01 political satire cover.indd - Philippine Center for Investigative ...
01 political satire cover.indd - Philippine Center for Investigative ...
01 political satire cover.indd - Philippine Center for Investigative ...
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
PCIJ<br />
P75<br />
November-December 2005<br />
i REPORT<br />
<strong>Philippine</strong> <strong>Center</strong> <strong>for</strong> <strong>Investigative</strong> Journalism<br />
Special on Pinoy Political Humor<br />
ATE GLOW<br />
HOT WATER in<br />
GUDANI & LANAO’S<br />
DIRTY<br />
SECRETS<br />
IMPERSONATING PRESIDENTS<br />
MICHAEL V’S MANY FACES<br />
WHAT PINOYS FIND FUNNY<br />
TEXT JOKES AS SIGNS OF THE TIMES<br />
THE END<br />
OF PEOPLE<br />
POWER?
C O N T E N T S<br />
PEOPLE POWER<br />
THE PARADOX OF FREEDOM:<br />
PEOPLE POWER IN THE<br />
INFORMATION AGE 2<br />
David Celdran<br />
When public space migrates to the airwaves and<br />
the news pages, politics risks degenerating into<br />
a spectator sport.<br />
ELECTIONS 2004<br />
LANAO’S DIRTY SECRETS 6<br />
Sheila S. Coronel<br />
What really happened in Lanao del Sur in 2004<br />
that prompted the attempts to silence Brig. Gen.<br />
Gudani?<br />
10 REASONS TO DOUBT THE<br />
2004 ELECTION RESULTS 12<br />
The numbers don’t always add up, and that’s<br />
just one reason why last year’s elections are so<br />
controversial.<br />
THE FUTURE OF ELECTIONS<br />
CAN COMELEC REFORM? 14<br />
Alecks. P. Pabico<br />
Despite being hounded by controversy, the elections<br />
body is resisting change.<br />
REFORM IN THE BARRACKS<br />
THE OFFICERS WHO SAY NO 16<br />
Luz Rimban<br />
Military and police officers believe re<strong>for</strong>ming the<br />
system begins with re<strong>for</strong>ming the individual.<br />
JOURNALIST AT RISK<br />
REPORTING UNDER THE GUN 20<br />
Vinia M. Datinguinoo<br />
Mei Magsino escaped the wrath of the alleged<br />
jueteng lord who is also Batangas governor.<br />
THE METROPOLIS<br />
BATTLE OF THE BILLBOARDS 24<br />
Charlene Dy<br />
They’re big, bold, and not quite beautiful. They<br />
can also be a health and environmental hazard,<br />
but so far, no one is policing billboards.<br />
WOMEN AND DISASTER<br />
RESILIENCE AMID RUIN 26<br />
Tess Bacalla<br />
Many more women than men died in the Aceh<br />
tsunami. Today the women survivors wrestle<br />
with disaster relief programs that don’t consider<br />
their special needs.<br />
YOUTH VOLUNTEERS<br />
A GIFT OF SELF 30<br />
Young people dis<strong>cover</strong> life’s meaning by doing<br />
volunteer work.<br />
SPECIAL ON PINOY POLITICAL HUMOR<br />
IMPERSONATING PRESIDENTS 32<br />
Elvira Mata<br />
This is a country where there’s always someone<br />
spoofing a president—dead or alive—on<br />
TV, during concerts, and from time to time, at<br />
people power marches. Five actors top the list<br />
of the country’s best impersonators.<br />
LA VIDA DOBLE 40<br />
Tony Velasquez<br />
Because <strong>Philippine</strong> politics is so ridiculous, amateur<br />
impersonators are having a feast.<br />
MOBILE CLOWNING 42<br />
Sheila S. Coronel<br />
The cellphone has only encouraged the Pinoy<br />
propensity <strong>for</strong> jokes.<br />
WHERE HAS ALL THE<br />
LAUGHTER GONE? 44<br />
Katrina Stuart Santiago<br />
Websites and blogs have provided an outlet <strong>for</strong><br />
<strong>political</strong> humor, but not all of them are funny.<br />
KICK OUT THE CLOWNS 50<br />
Alan C. Robles<br />
The popular view is that politics is a circus and<br />
politicians are clowns who entertain the public<br />
and make them laugh.<br />
MAILBOX<br />
Cover: Rene Boy Facunla, one of the bestknown<br />
impersonators of President Arroyo,<br />
finds himself in deep water.<br />
Photo by Lilen Uy<br />
Special thanks to Mandy Navasero<br />
Photos and Illustrations<br />
Malaya provided the photos <strong>for</strong> pp. 2,<br />
3 (upper right), 4 (top), 5 (top & bottom<br />
right), 8-9, 14, 16 (top), 17, 18, 32 (bottom)<br />
& 35. Sid Balatan took the photo on<br />
p.3. Those on p. 4 (bottom) and 15 are<br />
from PCIJ, on p. 5 from Kasaysayan. Bobby<br />
Timonera of Mindanews took the Lanao<br />
photos on pp. 6-8 & 10-11. Photos on<br />
pp. 16-17 are courtesy of P/Supt. Cesar<br />
Binag. Vinia Datinguinoo took the photos<br />
on pp. 20 and 22; those on pp. 21 & 23<br />
are courtesy of Mei Magsino-Lubis. Ben<br />
Razon shot the billboards <strong>for</strong> p.24. Jose<br />
Enrique Soriano took the photos of the<br />
tsunami victims in Aceh (pp. 26-28). The<br />
photo on p. 29 is from Greenpeace and<br />
on p. 30 from the National Youth Commission.<br />
Those on pp. 32, 34 (bottom),<br />
36-37 are from Willie Nepomuceno. Lilen<br />
Uy took the Ate Glow photos on pp. 33<br />
& 37. Michael V photos (pp. 34 and 37)<br />
are courtesy of GMA-7. The other photos<br />
are courtesy of Jon Santos (pp. 35-36),<br />
Tessie Tomas (p. 36), and Tony Velasquez<br />
(pp. 40-41). Illustrations on pp. 42-43 &<br />
48 are by Jun Aquino. Graphics on pp.<br />
44-46 courtesy of retzwerx.com.<br />
EDITOR<br />
Sheila S. Coronel<br />
DEPUTY EDITOR<br />
Cecile C.A. Balgos<br />
STAFF<br />
Yvonne T. Chua<br />
Luz Rimban<br />
Vinia M. Datinguinoo<br />
Alecks P. Pabico<br />
Avigail Olarte<br />
OFFICE MANAGER<br />
Fausta Cacdac<br />
BOARD OF EDITORS<br />
<strong>Philippine</strong> <strong>Center</strong> <strong>for</strong><br />
<strong>Investigative</strong> Journalism<br />
Sheila S. Coronel<br />
Marites Dañguilan Vitug<br />
Malou Mangahas<br />
Howie G. Severino<br />
David Celdran<br />
Ma. Ceres P. Doyo<br />
BOARD OF ADVISERS<br />
Jose V. Abueva<br />
Jose F. Lacaba<br />
Cecilia Lazaro<br />
Tina Monzon-Palma<br />
Sixto K. Roxas<br />
Jose M. Galang<br />
Published by the <strong>Philippine</strong> <strong>Center</strong> <strong>for</strong><br />
<strong>Investigative</strong> Journalism<br />
3/F Criselda II Building<br />
107 Scout de Guia Street<br />
Quezon City 1104<br />
T 41<strong>01</strong>383 F 929-3571<br />
Email: pcij@pcij.org; imag@pcij.org<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT
The end of people power? Anti-Arroyo<br />
protests have not quite reached<br />
people-power scale, unlike the<br />
movements against Estrada (center)<br />
and Marcos (far right).<br />
THE PARADOX<br />
PEOPLE POWER IN TH<br />
DAVID CELDRAN<br />
IT WAS the perfect <strong>for</strong>mula<br />
<strong>for</strong> another uprising. Factors<br />
and <strong>for</strong>ces that conspired<br />
to oust a previous<br />
president surfaced again<br />
to threaten yet another<br />
one out of power: a familiar<br />
pattern of titillating scandal<br />
and media overkill; congressional<br />
investigation and official<br />
<strong>cover</strong>-up; street protests and<br />
digital demonstrations.<br />
The opposition Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo<br />
faces today is fiercer<br />
and far more determined to<br />
oust her than that which <strong>for</strong>ced<br />
Joseph Estrada out of the Palace<br />
in 20<strong>01</strong>. Led by <strong>for</strong>mer President<br />
Cory Aquino and actress Susan<br />
Roces, two of the country’s most<br />
popular widows and compelling<br />
<strong>political</strong> leaders, it is an<br />
opposition that includes one<br />
of the broadest, if not the most<br />
unlikely, spectrum of activists<br />
assembled in recent years.<br />
Media <strong>cover</strong>age is likewise<br />
unprecedented. Twenty-fourhour<br />
news and live broadcasts<br />
have taken every whistleblower’s<br />
account (and private intrigues)<br />
to living rooms and offices everywhere.<br />
Anti-Arroyo blogging,<br />
until recently a fringe activity <strong>for</strong><br />
<strong>political</strong> junkies with too much<br />
time on their hands, has now<br />
exploded into the mainstream.<br />
So have ring tones, jokes, and<br />
gossip circulating via text.<br />
Like a virus contaminating<br />
everything from online chat<br />
rooms, office conversations,<br />
news broadcasts, showbiz talk<br />
shows, and text messages, there<br />
is no escaping “Gloriagate.”<br />
The damage to the president,<br />
as independent polling figures<br />
indicate, seems irreversible. If<br />
People Power had a script, then<br />
this would be it.<br />
Pundits predicted it was just<br />
going to be a matter of time be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
Edsa 4 erupted. All that was<br />
left was <strong>for</strong> people to spill out into<br />
the streets. Many did, but not in<br />
numbers that sent previous presidents<br />
packing. In the week that<br />
followed Cory Aquino’s surprise<br />
televised appeal <strong>for</strong> President<br />
Arroyo to resign, about 30,000<br />
to 40,000 protesters converged<br />
on Makati’s Ayala Avenue—the<br />
best ef<strong>for</strong>t so far since the crisis<br />
erupted. Organizers promised<br />
more, but the rallies on the days<br />
leading up to and immediately<br />
after the impeachment complaint<br />
was killed in Congress failed to<br />
meet expectations. Where was<br />
2 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
T H E E N D O F I N N O C E N C E<br />
OF FREEDOM<br />
E INFORMATION AGE<br />
People Power, or at least the<br />
kind that showed up in past Edsa<br />
uprisings?<br />
That’s what the opposition,<br />
the administration, and the media,<br />
who had already laid out<br />
its <strong>cover</strong>age plans <strong>for</strong> a fourth<br />
Edsa, were left asking. There<br />
was and continues to be no<br />
shortage of answers. Organizers<br />
within the anti-Arroyo opposition<br />
blame it on the lack of<br />
centralized leadership—and on<br />
mutual distrust. With a coalition<br />
as diverse in its representation<br />
as in its alternatives to President<br />
Arroyo, observers predicted that<br />
divisions within the movement<br />
would begin to affect the ability<br />
to communicate a coherent<br />
message and project a credible<br />
image to the public.<br />
From the onset, the presence<br />
of personalities affiliated with<br />
Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph<br />
Estrada in the coalition, both of<br />
whom were ousted by previous<br />
Edsa uprisings, created discom<strong>for</strong>t<br />
among People Power veterans.<br />
Those who had experienced the<br />
various Edsa uprisings, if only<br />
vicariously through news <strong>cover</strong>age,<br />
were just as perplexed—even<br />
outraged—by the odd coalition of<br />
<strong>for</strong>mer-enemies-now-bedfellows<br />
in the campaign to oust GMA.<br />
There were attempts to correct<br />
this public-relations confusion by<br />
giving the anti-Arroyo movement<br />
a more prominent middle-class,<br />
or put more accurately, a friendlier<br />
“middle-<strong>for</strong>ce” character. But<br />
repackaging the coalition proved<br />
difficult. In the age of in<strong>for</strong>mation,<br />
hardly anything can still be concealed<br />
from the public. Whatever<br />
the camera lens cannot expose<br />
is left over <strong>for</strong> the commentariat<br />
to scrutinize. Few secrets survive<br />
when the media’s attention is on<br />
overdrive.<br />
Previous Edsa revolts may<br />
have shared the same organizational<br />
limitations. But the lack of<br />
a central command, and a more<br />
defined, and there<strong>for</strong>e sustainable,<br />
organizational structure<br />
was less of a problem then<br />
since the uprisings unfolded so<br />
quickly. Ousting a president,<br />
unlike trans<strong>for</strong>ming society, requires<br />
less preparation. Organizational<br />
unity and ideological<br />
purity are not as critical—unless<br />
when waging protracted warfare.<br />
Nevertheless, the failure of<br />
organization remains a popular<br />
explanation <strong>for</strong> the absence<br />
of People Power in 2005. It is,<br />
however, far from being the only<br />
reason. Neither is it the most<br />
compelling.<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
3
POLITICS OF SCANDAL<br />
Gauging the public mood is<br />
often very tricky. Get it wrong<br />
and you either underestimate<br />
or overestimate how far people<br />
will go to express their outrage,<br />
if any at all. Surveys do provide<br />
clues to the pulse of people,<br />
but they cannot predict the<br />
often- spontaneous reactions to<br />
unfolding <strong>political</strong> events. Polls,<br />
if they are to be of any scientific<br />
use, should also be analyzed in<br />
the context of historical data.<br />
The overwhelmingly negative<br />
opinion of the president after<br />
the Senate investigations on illegal<br />
gambling, the release of the<br />
“Hello Garci” tapes to the media,<br />
and Arroyo’s public apology,<br />
follows a downward trajectory<br />
in presidential popularity after<br />
the 2004 elections. A look at<br />
postelection surveys already<br />
showed a majority dissatisfied<br />
with the administration, most<br />
even concluding fraud in the<br />
polls. While “Gloriagate” has<br />
pushed the president’s ratings<br />
to historic lows, Arroyo’s slide<br />
cannot be compared with the<br />
dramatic plunge Joseph Estrada<br />
took after the series of scandals<br />
exposed his undeclared wealth.<br />
If Erap’s ratings took a free fall,<br />
Arroyo’s numbers are slipping<br />
from previously low expectations<br />
of her leadership and prior<br />
questions about her <strong>political</strong><br />
legitimacy.<br />
Not that the public isn’t outraged<br />
by the allegations of presidential<br />
malfeasance; only that<br />
they may have, after a previous<br />
term marked by investigations<br />
on her husband, already conditioned<br />
themselves to expect<br />
more scandals ahead.<br />
No coincidence perhaps that<br />
Arroyo anchored her election<br />
campaign on the less-than-inspiring<br />
themes of pragmatism<br />
and continuity. Notably, though,<br />
Raul Roco, Eddie Villanueva,<br />
Panfilo Lacson and Fernando<br />
Poe, Jr. promised to bring moral<br />
leadership to Malacañang as a<br />
way to differentiate themselves<br />
from the incumbent.<br />
Presidential allies like to argue<br />
that the oust-Arroyo campaign is<br />
only round two of last year’s elections.<br />
That may be a shallow and<br />
self-serving analogy, but a quick<br />
look at the warm bodies occupying<br />
the street protests shows a<br />
who’s who of <strong>political</strong> partisans<br />
who campaigned <strong>for</strong> the president’s<br />
opponents. And like last<br />
year’s elections, the administration<br />
is once again selling to its<br />
core constituency the continuity<br />
of an Arroyo presidency over the<br />
risky alternative of a transition<br />
government or military-civilian<br />
junta.<br />
Fear of the unknown might<br />
be keeping People Power locked<br />
safely at home, but so too is fatigue.<br />
You hear it all the time<br />
on radio and television call-in<br />
programs: people are tired of<br />
politics. Not too tired to watch<br />
their politicians outdo the soaps<br />
on television, mind you, but too<br />
overwhelmed nonetheless by<br />
the <strong>political</strong> mudslinging that<br />
threatens to get anyone involved<br />
dirtied in the process.<br />
In this <strong>political</strong> free-<strong>for</strong>-all,<br />
take-no-prisoners brawl, no one<br />
is spared. Not the pious Cory, or<br />
the ever so proper Susan. Not<br />
even the Catholic bishops have<br />
managed to escape the public’s<br />
skepticism. Retired generals,<br />
civil-society leaders, even B-list<br />
actors—everyone is considered<br />
a plotter or a has-been mounting<br />
a comeback. Distrust <strong>for</strong> public<br />
figures has reached alarming<br />
levels so much that people now<br />
find it hard to make out the crusaders<br />
from the carpetbaggers,<br />
the journalists from the spin<br />
doctors, the well-meaning from<br />
the just plain mean.<br />
When the citizens’ trust in<br />
institutions, in leaders, and ultimately<br />
in themselves erodes,<br />
a climate of <strong>political</strong> nihilism<br />
takes over and people begin to<br />
withdraw from civic life and give<br />
up on <strong>political</strong> action altogether.<br />
Strange bedfellows.<br />
Former rivals get<br />
together on the<br />
streets, from left,<br />
Ping Lacson, Eddie<br />
Villanueva, Cory<br />
Aquino, and Susan<br />
Roces.<br />
This is the end of innocence—the<br />
rude awakening to a world the<br />
way politicians see it: a politics<br />
without the illusions of greatness<br />
and heroics. It is shades of grey<br />
all over and murky definitions<br />
of the public good. This is the<br />
moral relativism abhorred by<br />
both idealists and conservatives<br />
everywhere. But after a history<br />
of revolutions with disappointing<br />
results, Filipinos have learned to<br />
adjust and adapt.<br />
Goodbye, Erap! The uprising<br />
against Estrada was inspired<br />
by moral outrage. Today<br />
things are murkier and no<br />
one seems to be taking the<br />
moral high ground.<br />
REDEFINING PUBLIC<br />
SPACE<br />
Yet this does not seem to be<br />
the most crucial reason why, at<br />
a time when society enjoys unprecedented<br />
freedom of speech,<br />
movement, and expression,<br />
there is also a retreat in <strong>political</strong><br />
activism. Therein in fact lies the<br />
paradox of freedom.<br />
Protesters occupy city streets<br />
and parks to get their message<br />
across to as many people as<br />
possible. Citizens are <strong>for</strong>ced<br />
to do that when they do not<br />
have equal access to the state’s<br />
in<strong>for</strong>mation apparatus. Public<br />
4 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
T H E E N D O F I N N O C E N C E<br />
space then is where the battle<br />
<strong>for</strong> hearts and minds begins and<br />
where like-minded citizens come<br />
together to swap in<strong>for</strong>mation, affirm<br />
their convictions, and challenge<br />
official positions—more<br />
so when government control<br />
of in<strong>for</strong>mation is complete. The<br />
contested space is usually rich<br />
in symbolic meaning, but it may<br />
also just be a convenient location<br />
to converge. Edsa represents<br />
both. And in the 1986 revolt,<br />
more than a million considered<br />
it to be the most effective way<br />
to be heard and counted. Back<br />
then, no broadcast network or<br />
mainstream broadsheet would<br />
have ever given the opposition<br />
to Ferdinand Marcos any space,<br />
and so a frustrated people took<br />
to the streets.<br />
A lot has changed since 1986.<br />
Freedoms like that of the press<br />
were restored, but these were<br />
never absolutely immune from<br />
presidential pressure. The relative<br />
timidity of the news media prior to<br />
and immediately after the Chavit<br />
Singson exposé <strong>for</strong>ced anti-Estrada<br />
sentiments through new media<br />
channels such as SMS and the<br />
Internet. But the limited broadcast<br />
capabilities of these new technologies<br />
made reaching a wider public<br />
difficult. The crowds at Edsa provided<br />
the link between individual<br />
and society. Just as followers of<br />
deposed President Estrada would<br />
later use their own version of Edsa<br />
to communicate with a wider audience<br />
they couldn’t reach through<br />
the TV networks that had largely<br />
ignored them.<br />
The media landscape has<br />
changed dramatically since 1986<br />
and even since 20<strong>01</strong>. Today<br />
the media have taken their role<br />
as public watchdog to new<br />
extremes. Conscious that their<br />
power to influence <strong>political</strong><br />
events—even make and break<br />
presidents—is only as potent as<br />
their ability to generate a vast<br />
share of the audience, the news<br />
media have been treading the<br />
line between crusading journalism<br />
and mass entertainment.<br />
(It is no accident that both are<br />
immensely popular with the<br />
market.)<br />
The result has been an increasingly<br />
hysterical, albeit, massively<br />
entertaining politics. Call it<br />
the tabloidization of public life.<br />
When public space migrates to<br />
the airwaves and to the pages of<br />
broadsheets, the nation’s politics<br />
adapts to its new home. It’s as<br />
if all <strong>political</strong> behavior is trans<strong>for</strong>med<br />
by and <strong>for</strong> the camera.<br />
Everyone, from the president to<br />
the street protester, is in on it.<br />
Legislation is out. Congressional<br />
inquiry is in. Proselytizing—out,<br />
agit-prop—definitely in. Political<br />
actors learn to master the<br />
medium and use the live press<br />
conference with skill. Mutineers<br />
take questions from the press<br />
and whistleblowers are assigned<br />
publicists to assist them. Had<br />
Spectator sport?<br />
There is outrage on<br />
the streets, as shown<br />
in this anti-Arroyo<br />
rally, but still, most<br />
people are content<br />
to just watch it all on<br />
television, in contrast<br />
to Edsa 1 (below,<br />
extreme right), when<br />
the multitudes took to<br />
the streets.<br />
President Arroyo resigned on<br />
that Friday Cory Aquino and the<br />
“Hyatt 10”called on her to step<br />
down, the <strong>Philippine</strong>s would<br />
have enjoyed the distinction of<br />
launching the first electronic uprising<br />
in history. It would have<br />
been dubbed the Presscon Revolution—if<br />
only it had succeeded.<br />
Clearly, revolutions that happen<br />
in the hyperreal world of television<br />
cannot replace those of real<br />
boots on the ground.<br />
The stagecraft and spin-doctoring<br />
politicians try so hard to<br />
conceal is laid bare <strong>for</strong> all to see.<br />
Like wrestling matches we know<br />
to be scripted but cheer on nevertheless,<br />
our politics, after years<br />
of sensationalism, is degenerating<br />
into little more than a spectator<br />
sport. By jeering, or cheering,<br />
people feel that they’re actually<br />
getting involved. Without having<br />
to leave their homes, people can<br />
have the satisfaction of watching<br />
talk-show hosts articulate feelings<br />
of disgust and frustration<br />
<strong>for</strong> them. When you listen in<br />
to radio commentators beat up<br />
politicians on air, you can’t help<br />
but wonder if expressing your<br />
opinion—the least of your civic<br />
responsibilities—may actually<br />
still matter, when those guys<br />
seem to do a better job at it.<br />
But those who predict the<br />
end of People Power are wrong.<br />
Apathy may be a symptom of the<br />
growing disconnection between<br />
citizens and their government,<br />
but indifference is also a <strong>for</strong>m of<br />
protest against politics as usual<br />
in the country. Could it be that<br />
the steady diet of scandals have<br />
numbed the senses and the<br />
ability to express outrage? Or is<br />
People Power merely evolving,<br />
adapting to new <strong>for</strong>ms of public<br />
space—physical and virtual?<br />
Today’s young, the first generation<br />
of kids growing up in a<br />
digitally interconnected world<br />
will determine how dissent will<br />
be defined and expressed in the<br />
future, be it through podcasts,<br />
audio-video blogs, or new <strong>for</strong>ms<br />
of social organization. History,<br />
after all, has taught us that people,<br />
when pushed hard enough,<br />
will eventually organize, fight<br />
back, and seek to overthrow the<br />
conditions that oppress them.<br />
i<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
5
SHEILA S. CORONEL<br />
(WITH ADDITIONAL REPORTING<br />
BY BOOMA C. CRUZ AND<br />
“PROBE”)<br />
THE GHOSTS of<br />
the last elections<br />
haunt Lanao del<br />
Sur and they refuse<br />
to rest. They will<br />
not go away. They<br />
flit about, seeking<br />
resolution. So when Brig. Gen.<br />
Francisco Gudani, the commander<br />
of the Marine brigade stationed<br />
in the province during the last<br />
election, testified in the Senate<br />
in September, saying that he had<br />
been mysteriously relieved from<br />
his post two days after the voting,<br />
the ghosts were roused again. Days<br />
after the Senate hearing, Gudani<br />
and one of his officers, Marine Lt.<br />
Col. Alexander Balutan, were sent<br />
to court martial <strong>for</strong> refusing to heed<br />
their superiors’ orders not to testify.<br />
The ghosts, having been roused,<br />
are now rattling even more noisily<br />
than ever be<strong>for</strong>e.<br />
What really happened in<br />
Lanao del Sur in May 2004? What<br />
did the military do there that necessitated<br />
the relief of a stubborn<br />
general and later, his frantic superiors’<br />
ef<strong>for</strong>ts to ensure he would<br />
not break the silence? What other<br />
dirty secrets lie buried in Lanao?<br />
The answer to these questions<br />
is whispered about on the streets<br />
of Marawi and elsewhere in the<br />
province. There was massive<br />
cheating in the presidential count,<br />
residents and officials there say,<br />
and it involved several groups<br />
of operators, some from Manila,<br />
others homegrown. It happened,<br />
they say, with the complicity of<br />
the military, the Commission on<br />
Elections (Comelec), and even<br />
Malacañang.<br />
President Gloria Macapagal-<br />
Arroyo insists that she won fair<br />
and square. Despite doubts that<br />
had been raised about the conduct<br />
of the polls, she says that<br />
survey results and international<br />
election monitors attest to her<br />
victory. She dismisses the accusations<br />
of fraud and says her<br />
enemies are resurrecting the<br />
election charges because they<br />
want to unseat her.<br />
In 2004, Arroyo scored one<br />
of her bigger election triumphs<br />
in Lanao del Sur. There, according<br />
to the official Comelec count,<br />
she clobbered her closest rival,<br />
actor Fernando Poe Jr. The score:<br />
158,748 vs. 50,107, or a ratio of<br />
three votes to one. While Arroyo<br />
did even better in her home<br />
province of Pampanga, and also<br />
in Cebu, where she was an early<br />
favorite, the Lanao del Sur upset<br />
was astonishing because Poe was<br />
wildly popular there, if only because<br />
nearly every Maranao had<br />
seen “Magnum .357,” the movie<br />
where the actor, expertly wielding<br />
a revolver, played the role of<br />
a fearless Moro policeman.<br />
Questions about the Lanao<br />
results were raised even during<br />
the congressional canvass<br />
that preceded the president’s<br />
proclamation. Even then, the<br />
opposition had pointed out<br />
some eye-popping anomalies.<br />
In the town of Poona Bayabao,<br />
<strong>for</strong> example, Arroyo got all 4,700<br />
votes; all the other presidential<br />
candidates scored zero. Yet<br />
precinct-level election returns<br />
obtained by both the opposition<br />
and the local chapter of the<br />
National Citizens’ Movement <strong>for</strong><br />
Free Elections (Namfrel) showed<br />
substantial votes <strong>for</strong> Poe. In October,<br />
“The Probe Team” visited<br />
the town and nearly everyone<br />
they talked to there swore they<br />
had voted <strong>for</strong> FPJ.<br />
Indeed, <strong>for</strong> the entire province,<br />
both the opposition and Namfrel<br />
count based on precinct returns<br />
showed Poe overtaking Arroyo<br />
by a mile. Yet by the time the<br />
Comelec finished the provincial<br />
canvass, the ratios were reversed<br />
in the president’s favor.<br />
The opposition cried foul but<br />
its protests were drowned out by<br />
the majority during the congressional<br />
canvass. The local Namfrel<br />
chapter held press conferences,<br />
saying that its own incomplete<br />
count showed Arroyo’s votes<br />
padded in the final Comelec results<br />
by 21,217 votes, while Poe’s<br />
were shaved by 9,174. But this,<br />
too, went unheeded.<br />
After all, everyone is blasé<br />
about cheating in Lanao. The<br />
province’s reputation precedes it.<br />
In 1949, by all accounts a fraudulent<br />
election, it was said that “the<br />
birds and the bees” voting in<br />
Lanao enabled Elpidio Quirino<br />
to bag the presidency. During the<br />
Marcos era, the joke was that after<br />
every voting, Ali Dimaporo, the<br />
Maranao strongman who was a<br />
staunch ally of the dictator, would<br />
call up Malacañang and ask his<br />
patron, “Apo, how many more<br />
votes do you need?” Decades<br />
later, not much seemed to have<br />
changed, but that didn’t seem to<br />
bother anyone. And so the issue<br />
LANAO<br />
DIRTY<br />
SECRE<br />
6 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
E L E C T I O N S 2 0 0 4<br />
’S<br />
Rigged count. The<br />
2004 elections in<br />
Lanao del Sur were<br />
deceptively calm,<br />
with Marines (right<br />
photo) administering<br />
the voting in places<br />
where there were not<br />
enough teachers to<br />
man the polls.<br />
TS<br />
was more or less laid to rest, or<br />
so most people thought.<br />
And then the “Hello, Garci?”<br />
tapes surfaced. Containing the<br />
wiretapped conversations between<br />
President Arroyo and<br />
<strong>for</strong>mer Comelec Commissioner<br />
Virgilio Garcillano in May and<br />
June 2004, the recording stirred<br />
things up once more. Among<br />
other things, it showed that<br />
three of the 14 phone calls Arroyo<br />
made to the commissioner<br />
concerned the Lanao count. In<br />
one of those phone calls, Garcillano<br />
even assured the president<br />
that in Lanao as well as Basilan<br />
“itong ginawa nilang pagpataas<br />
sa inyo, maayos naman ang<br />
paggawa (they did a fine job<br />
of increasing your votes).” This<br />
caused the resurrection of the<br />
ghosts. They had not been laid<br />
to rest, after all.<br />
A LANDSCAPE OF<br />
GHOSTS<br />
Lanao’s is a landscape of rugged<br />
hills, lakes, and swamps. It is<br />
crisscrossed by the mighty Agus<br />
and Cotabato Rivers and their<br />
tributaries. More than half of the<br />
province is still <strong>for</strong>ested land and<br />
many of its inhabitants are poor,<br />
living on subsistence fishing and<br />
farming. Many towns still don’t<br />
have electricity or have it only an<br />
hour or so a day. Piped water is<br />
a luxury, so it is in muddy wells<br />
and pools that villagers drink,<br />
bathe, and do their laundry.<br />
Lanao del Sur is very much datu<br />
country—it is a smattering of little<br />
fiefdoms ruled by big men.<br />
Warring clans hold sway there,<br />
exacting loyalty and obedience<br />
from their members. This is a<br />
country of ghosts, a land of dark<br />
secrets and unsettled scores.<br />
Everyone says there is no<br />
such thing as an honest election<br />
in Lanao. Local bosses, usually<br />
armed, buy and bully their way to<br />
public office. If this does not suffice,<br />
they kill and cheat. Ordinary<br />
voters are too poor or too weak,<br />
or live in villages too far from the<br />
counting, to resist the intimidation<br />
and the fraud. Inevitably, Lanao<br />
elections are marred by violent<br />
incidents involving the killing of<br />
candidates and their supporters<br />
and the switching of ballot boxes.<br />
During the 20<strong>01</strong> election count,<br />
the provincial capitol, where the<br />
canvassing was being held, was<br />
hit by mortar fire.<br />
The common belief in Lanao<br />
is that the Comelec officials in the<br />
province, the teachers who man<br />
the polls, even the watchers of<br />
rival candidates can be bought;<br />
if not, they can be kidnapped<br />
or threatened. This is why the<br />
operatives of desperate senatorial<br />
candidates go to Lanao (as<br />
well as other places in Mindanao)<br />
to “buy” votes even days<br />
and weeks after election day. A<br />
network of dagdag-bawas (votepadding<br />
and shaving) operators<br />
has existed there <strong>for</strong> some time,<br />
and they are available <strong>for</strong> a<br />
price. Some of them approach<br />
the candidates and offer to rig<br />
the count <strong>for</strong> a fee; sometimes<br />
savvy <strong>political</strong> operators working<br />
<strong>for</strong> Manila-based politicians and<br />
parties seek them out, with an<br />
“order” <strong>for</strong> manufactured votes.<br />
The operators are masters of<br />
their craft: they either fabricate<br />
election returns or certificates of<br />
canvass or else tamper with the<br />
genuine ones. They also pay off<br />
election officials and teachers to<br />
ensure their complicity in the<br />
fraud.<br />
While the results of the local<br />
elections are closely monitored<br />
by rival candidates and their<br />
supporters, making it more difficult,<br />
although by no means<br />
impossible, to mess around<br />
with the count, few people in<br />
Lanao care about the national<br />
count. There are few watchers<br />
left when the national count<br />
is done. While there is a local<br />
Namfrel chapter, it cannot <strong>cover</strong><br />
the length and breadth of Lanao.<br />
Besides, being volunteers and<br />
being unarmed in a province<br />
where might is right, they can<br />
be intimidated as well.<br />
Just about the only ones who<br />
had the means to police the elections<br />
effectively in Lanao del Sur<br />
were the Marines. The 1 st Marine<br />
Brigade was stationed in Camp<br />
Keithley, the military camp on<br />
a hill in Marawi, the province’s<br />
lakeshore capital. The Marines<br />
were new to Lanao del Sur, having<br />
been assigned there only in<br />
2003. By the time of the elections,<br />
they had been stationed<br />
there only about a year and<br />
so had not been dirtied by the<br />
politics of the place. They took<br />
their role seriously, even holding<br />
dialogues and “peace covenants”<br />
among rival <strong>political</strong> groups.<br />
“This is the first time a Marine<br />
brigade is being assigned in the<br />
Lanao del Sur area,” Brig. Gen.<br />
Gudani said in his Senate testimony<br />
on September 28, “and that’s why<br />
my instruction to everybody was<br />
clear: we need to hold a clean,<br />
honest, peaceful election.”<br />
“We were victims of circumstances,”<br />
was all Lt. Col. Balutan,<br />
commander of the 7 th Marine<br />
battalion assigned to secure 17<br />
municipalities of Lanao del Sur,<br />
would say when he testified at<br />
the Senate also on September 28.<br />
“I stood my ground against <strong>for</strong>ces<br />
or pressures from any <strong>political</strong><br />
entity… I promised the people<br />
of Lanao a peaceful and credible<br />
election…I told them the armed<br />
<strong>for</strong>ces and the Marines will protect<br />
your vote and we will have a<br />
clean and credible election.”<br />
FRUSTRATING THE<br />
MARINES<br />
To some extent, the Marines<br />
succeeded. The voting was<br />
relatively uneventful by Lanao<br />
standards, although there were<br />
a few shootouts and attempts to<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
7
switch ballot boxes. A failure of<br />
elections was declared in several<br />
towns, but not quite as many as<br />
in the past. On the request of<br />
the candidates, who feared violence<br />
if the counting were held<br />
in many different places, the<br />
canvass in all but two of Lanao<br />
del Sur’s 39 towns was held in<br />
scenic Marawi, on the northern<br />
shore of Lake Lanao. The actual<br />
voting on May 10 and the first<br />
few days of the canvass were<br />
tightly secured by the Marines,<br />
and it was partly <strong>for</strong> this reason<br />
that the municipal counts, while<br />
not completely blameless, went<br />
relatively well, even resulting in<br />
the defeat of a handful of wellentrenched<br />
local dynasties.<br />
The Marines, however, could<br />
not prevent what now appears<br />
to have been a large-scale manipulation<br />
of the presidential<br />
count. Judging from the parallel<br />
counts based on election returns<br />
obtained by Namfrel and the opposition,<br />
the presidential votes<br />
seem to have been tampered<br />
with big time, not at the precinct<br />
level but at the municipal and<br />
provincial canvass.<br />
Unknown to both Namfrel and<br />
the opposition, or <strong>for</strong> that matter,<br />
the Marines, several groups taking<br />
orders from the administration<br />
had been assigned to “operate” in<br />
Lanao and other Mindanao provinces.<br />
According to interviews<br />
with individuals who were part<br />
of the postelection operations<br />
in Mindanao, these groups were<br />
moving independently of each<br />
other and were apparently not<br />
aware of each other’s movements.<br />
But their instructions were the<br />
Tell that to the Marines?<br />
Gudani (above) and<br />
Balutan (right) told the<br />
Senate that the Marines<br />
(below, left) did their<br />
best to ensure an honest<br />
election in Lanao.<br />
same: ensure the president wins<br />
by a million votes.<br />
One of the groups was led<br />
by Virgilio Garcillano, the commissioner<br />
who was ostensibly assigned<br />
to Southern Tagalog. His<br />
role was to get the cooperation<br />
of Comelec field personnel in the<br />
tampering of the count in Lanao<br />
and other places in Mindanao,<br />
apparently with the knowledge<br />
of the president herself, at least<br />
as indicated by the conversations<br />
in the “Hello, Garci” tapes.<br />
Another group involved Nagamura<br />
Moner, a Maranao politician<br />
and currently a shari’ah court<br />
judge who is widely seen in<br />
Lanao as a <strong>political</strong> operator in<br />
the employ of First Gentleman<br />
Jose Miguel ‘Mike’ Arroyo. Two of<br />
Moner’s followers—Abdul Wahab<br />
Batugan and Lomala Macadaub—<br />
told “The Probe Team” that during<br />
the canvassing, they were sent<br />
by Moner to different provinces<br />
in Muslim Mindanao where they<br />
distributed cash to Comelec<br />
personnel “para baliktarin ang<br />
COCs (to reverse what’s in the<br />
certificates of canvass).”<br />
The third group involved the<br />
military, but it is unclear how<br />
far up the chain of command<br />
the conspiracy went. Based on<br />
testimonies so far given at the<br />
Senate and the AFP Fact-Finding<br />
Board, senior military officers in<br />
Mindanao were involved in ensuring<br />
that the operators could<br />
do their work and in at least one<br />
instance, instructed soldiers to<br />
take part in the cheating.<br />
SUSPICIOUS MOVES<br />
A few days be<strong>for</strong>e the elections,<br />
there were already signs that<br />
things were going awry.<br />
On May 6, four days be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
election day, Garcillano, who was<br />
also the commissioner in charge<br />
of personnel, removed Helen<br />
Flores, the Comelec regional<br />
director <strong>for</strong> Muslim Mindanao,<br />
from her post and transferred her<br />
to Western Mindanao. The timing<br />
of the reshuffle just days be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
the polling was highly unusual.<br />
Even more suspicious, Flores was<br />
replaced by her deputy, Renato<br />
Magbutay, who was known to<br />
be Garcillano’s protégé. Comelec<br />
sources in Manila and Mindanao<br />
say that Flores, while also close<br />
to commissioner, had a reputation<br />
<strong>for</strong> being hard-headed; “hindi nila<br />
mapasunod (they couldn’t make<br />
her follow their orders).”<br />
Gudani, in his Senate testimony,<br />
said that he was surprised<br />
to find that just a few days be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
May 10, Ray Sumalipao, the<br />
provincial elections officer <strong>for</strong><br />
Lanao del Sur, was changing the<br />
assignment of election inspectors<br />
and the clustering centers of the<br />
voting precincts. Sumalipao, the<br />
general said, was taking orders<br />
from Garcillano. The two elections<br />
officials were known to be<br />
particularly close. Sumalipao was<br />
in fact the election supervisor <strong>for</strong><br />
Lanao del Norte but was moved<br />
to Lanao del Sur in February<br />
2004, shortly after Garcillano’s<br />
appointment as commissioner.<br />
Sumalipao denies taking instructions<br />
from Garcillano during<br />
the elections. He also says that<br />
contrary to Gudani’s testimony,<br />
he didn’t move election personnel<br />
prior to the voting. “The<br />
clustering was approved by the<br />
commission way be<strong>for</strong>e the elections,”<br />
he says. “It was Gudani<br />
who wanted to change the clustering,<br />
but the Comelec approved<br />
the recommendation of the election<br />
officers. He’s lying.”<br />
A lawyer employed by the<br />
Comelec since 1961 and assigned<br />
to Mindanao <strong>for</strong> most of his 40<br />
years at the commission, the<br />
amiable Garcillano was a familiar<br />
figure among the Comelec field<br />
personnel on the island. In fact,<br />
all the Comelec employees there<br />
8 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
E L E C T I O N S 2 0 0 4<br />
called him “Tatay,” or “Dad.”<br />
Having risen up the ranks and<br />
cultivated friendships with election<br />
bureaucrats, he was known<br />
<strong>for</strong> being approachable and also<br />
<strong>for</strong> taking care of his people.<br />
Garcilliano was particularly<br />
familiar with Lanao del Sur,<br />
having served as the provincial<br />
election supervisor there from<br />
1970 to 1971 and having been<br />
assigned to supervise either the<br />
registration or the election there<br />
several times in the 1990s. So<br />
close were the Lanao Comelec<br />
officials to Garcillano that in<br />
February 2004, they all signed<br />
a manifesto supporting his appointment<br />
as commissioner.<br />
Garcillano was in Manila<br />
during the election and the<br />
counting. But he sent his trusted<br />
nephew, Michaelangelo Zuce, to<br />
monitor the operations <strong>for</strong> him.<br />
Zuce, who was then employed in<br />
the office of Jose Ma. Rufino, the<br />
presidential adviser on <strong>political</strong><br />
affairs, has since testified in the<br />
Senate and implicated his uncle<br />
in a conspiracy to rig the polls<br />
that included payoffs made to<br />
compliant Comelec officials and<br />
personnel.<br />
In an interview with “The<br />
Probe Team” in October, Zuce<br />
revealed that he was in Mindanao<br />
even be<strong>for</strong>e election day, keeping<br />
an eye on what was happening<br />
there. Lanao del Sur, he said,<br />
became a cause of concern. “I<br />
was talking frequently to the provincial<br />
election supervisor there,”<br />
he said in Tagalog. “He told me<br />
they could not move because the<br />
security was strict. The Marines<br />
were very strict.”<br />
Zuce said that he reported the<br />
matter to his uncle. Garcillano<br />
apparently complained about the<br />
strict Marines to military authorities,<br />
having received reports not just<br />
from Zuce but other in<strong>for</strong>mants.<br />
The leaked tape containing the<br />
commissioner’s wiretapped conversations<br />
reveals that in a phone<br />
conversation with the president<br />
in the evening of May 28, 2004,<br />
Garcillano said he had to ask Brig.<br />
Gen. Hermogenes Esperon Jr., then<br />
deputy chief of staff <strong>for</strong> operations,<br />
and then Southern Command chief<br />
Lt. Gen. Roy Kyamko to get Gudani<br />
out of Lanao.<br />
GUDANI’S SUMMONS<br />
On May 12, 2004, Gudani was<br />
summoned to Manila by higher<br />
headquarters. He left Marawi<br />
the same day, reported to both<br />
Navy Flag Officer-in-Command<br />
Adm. Ernesto de Leon and the<br />
Marine Commandant Gen. Emmanuel<br />
Teodosio, and was told<br />
to take a break—“play golf, go<br />
to Boracay.”<br />
Gudani, in his Senate testimony,<br />
said this was to him an<br />
“incomprehensible and illogical<br />
order” since his presence in<br />
Lanao was crucial. The canvassing<br />
was then taking place in<br />
several buildings in and around<br />
the provincial capitol in Marawi.<br />
Gudani had two battalions—<br />
about 200 men—to secure the<br />
counting, and he was worried<br />
that these were not enough.<br />
What Gudani did not know<br />
was that on the same day that he<br />
left Marawi, Zuce drove into town.<br />
Capt. Marlon Mendoza, who was<br />
Commander in chief. President<br />
Arroyo won by a landslide in<br />
Lanao del Sur, but questions<br />
about the integrity of the voting<br />
there has tainted her victory.<br />
detailed to the Comelec as Garcillano’s<br />
security but was assigned<br />
to secure the commissioner’s<br />
nephew instead, was with Zuce<br />
on May 12. In an affidavit he submitted<br />
to the Senate last August,<br />
Mendoza said that on that day, he<br />
saw Zuce approach Sumalipao in<br />
one of the canvassing centers “and<br />
I personally saw a large amount of<br />
cash in an envelope being given<br />
to the said Comelec director.”<br />
Mendoza alleged that he and<br />
Zuce returned to the canvass<br />
center the next day, May 13, and<br />
this was when he heard Zuce<br />
telling Sumalipao “that he is doing<br />
something <strong>for</strong> the success of<br />
GMA in the election.”<br />
But Sumalipao angrily denies<br />
having seen Zuce during<br />
the canvass. “I know Zuce,” he<br />
says. “I met him at Garcillano’s<br />
office and he was introduced<br />
as the commissioner’s nephew,<br />
but I never saw him in Marawi<br />
or Lanao during the canvassing.”<br />
The security at the canvass center,<br />
he says, was very strict and<br />
it would not have been possible<br />
<strong>for</strong> Zuce and other unauthorized<br />
people to get in.<br />
Meanwhile, on May 12, Col.<br />
Gomiendo Pirino, an Army officer<br />
previously assigned to the<br />
Southcom headquarters in Zamboanga<br />
City, took over Gudani’s<br />
command. This was resented by<br />
the Marines because Pirino was a<br />
colonel assuming a general’s post,<br />
and he wasn’t even a Marine.<br />
Balutan, a decorated combat<br />
officer, bristled. “My brigade<br />
commander was relieved…<strong>for</strong><br />
no apparent reason,” he told the<br />
Senate, “maybe <strong>for</strong> doing his<br />
job well, <strong>for</strong> being a<strong>political</strong>.” In<br />
contrast, he said, Pirino told him<br />
to “support the administration.”<br />
When asked by the senators what<br />
this meant, Balutan replied that<br />
he understood it to mean that he<br />
should “slacken security.”<br />
The Marines were strict, said<br />
Balutan, preventing the entry<br />
into the canvass centers of those<br />
who were not authorized to<br />
be there. They also held their<br />
ground. In his testimony be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
the AFP Fact-Finding Board set<br />
up to investigate the alleged involvement<br />
of the military in election<br />
fraud, Balutan recounted<br />
how his fellow Marines defied<br />
orders to cheat.<br />
Sources in the Board say<br />
that Balutan, in his testimony,<br />
recounted the attempt to coopt<br />
members of the 11 th Marine<br />
battalion into the conspiracy of<br />
fraud. About half of the battalion,<br />
then stationed at the Southcom<br />
headquarters in Zamboanga<br />
City, was sent to Marawi a week<br />
be<strong>for</strong>e the elections to help<br />
administer the voting. There,<br />
they underwent training by the<br />
Comelec, so they could act as<br />
election inspectors as there were<br />
not enough teachers to man all<br />
the precincts in Lanao.<br />
Instead, said Balutan, the<br />
whole battalion was being instructed<br />
to cheat. Pirino and<br />
another Army officer, he said, instructed<br />
the battalion commander,<br />
Col. Remigio Valdez, how to rig<br />
the count. Valdez, who is now<br />
in schooling in the United States,<br />
resisted, Balutan said, but it was<br />
possible that he was bypassed.<br />
Since 2005, Pirino has been<br />
the commander of the Armed<br />
Forces Reserve Command headquartered<br />
in Pagadian. Contacted<br />
by telephone, he refused to answer<br />
questions. “I will only talk<br />
at the proper <strong>for</strong>um and proper<br />
time,” he said. “Any unnecessary<br />
comment I’ll make will only sensationalize<br />
the issue.”<br />
With Pirino in command in<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
9
Camp Keithley, there was a<br />
noticeable decline in the security<br />
of the canvass centers, says<br />
Lanao del Sur Namfrel chair<br />
Abdullah Dalidig. “The Namfrel<br />
people were no longer allowed<br />
in, because of Comelec’s order,”<br />
he remembers. “Most of the<br />
watchers were also unable to<br />
get in, and even if they got in,<br />
‘di na nakasalita (they were not<br />
allowed to talk).”<br />
Dalidig says Pirino, who<br />
is also Maranao, is his distant<br />
relative. Sometime during the<br />
canvassing, when the Namfrel<br />
chair threatened to complain<br />
and to expose what he knew,<br />
the colonel visited him at his<br />
office. Recounts Dalidig: “He<br />
told me, ‘Huwag mo ituloy ang<br />
pagbubulgar. Tulungan mo ‘ko<br />
(don’t speak out anymore, just<br />
help me) because GMA is going<br />
to promote me to general.’ He<br />
said he was asked to watch me<br />
because according to Garci, Namfrel<br />
of Lanao is a problem.”<br />
THE “TAPAL-TAPAL”<br />
OPERATIONS<br />
As the security slackened, the<br />
operators were able to do their<br />
work. Zuce said one of his tasks<br />
was to check on the count. Long<br />
be<strong>for</strong>e the elections, he said,<br />
his uncle had already laid the<br />
groundwork. As early as 2002,<br />
Garcillano had already been<br />
meeting with key Comelec personnel<br />
in Mindanao to ensure<br />
they would do everything to<br />
make the president win. In those<br />
meetings, which Zuce helped<br />
organize, envelopes of cash were<br />
given out to the Comelec bureaucrats<br />
in attendance, he said.<br />
Zuce’s role in the counting<br />
phase of the election was to<br />
check on whether the Comelec<br />
people were doing what they<br />
had agreed to do. He estimated<br />
Guarding the<br />
ballot. Marine<br />
secures the voting<br />
in Lanao del Sur.<br />
that Garcillano’s group was<br />
given a budget of P9 million<br />
to P12 million <strong>for</strong> this phase<br />
of their operations, although<br />
they had asked <strong>for</strong> more than<br />
P30 million. The money, Zuce<br />
learned from his uncle, came<br />
from Pampanga jueteng lord<br />
Rodolfo ‘Bong’ Pineda. Some of<br />
it already reached the Comelec<br />
people days be<strong>for</strong>e the voting,<br />
he said, but more payoffs were<br />
made during the count.<br />
President Arroyo, who Zuce<br />
said hosted meetings <strong>for</strong> Mindanao-based<br />
Comelec personnel<br />
in her Quezon City home prior<br />
to the 2004 election campaign,<br />
has scoffed at the latter’s allegations,<br />
saying that it was<br />
“black propaganda” concocted<br />
by “those who are in need of<br />
money and whose testimonies<br />
are <strong>for</strong> sale.”<br />
But Zuce, who is in hiding,<br />
insists on the veracity of<br />
his story. He says that during<br />
the counting, he went around<br />
the different canvass centers to<br />
check how the president was<br />
doing. He would then report<br />
to his uncle on the progress of<br />
the count. If Arroyo was lagging<br />
in a provincial canvass, he<br />
would ask the Comelec officials<br />
there, “Bakit ganu’n ang nangyari,<br />
akala ko kontrol natin…<br />
baka puwedeng gawan natin<br />
na paraan na magtapal tayo,<br />
madagdagan natin ng ganito<br />
kalaki. (How did that happen?<br />
I thought we had everything<br />
under control…Maybe we can<br />
do something to remedy the<br />
situation, we can add this much<br />
more votes).”<br />
He said he left it to the Comelec<br />
people to decide how they<br />
would rig the count. “Sila na<br />
nakakaalam no’n, kung anong<br />
diskarte doon sa provincial<br />
canvassing (They’re the ones<br />
who know what do, they had<br />
to make the calculations and<br />
work these out in the provincial<br />
canvassing).” But, he added,<br />
when Poe’s lead was too big, as<br />
in Misamis Oriental, the operators<br />
there risked dis<strong>cover</strong>y if they<br />
padded and shaved the votes too<br />
much. To compensate <strong>for</strong> the<br />
Misamis Oriental upset, he said,<br />
they had to pad even more the<br />
Arroyo votes in Lanao del Sur<br />
and Maguindanao. Comelec<br />
figures show that it was in these<br />
two provinces that the president<br />
posted her biggest winning margins<br />
in the whole of Mindanao.<br />
Zuce’s story is partly corroborated<br />
by the testimony of Capt.<br />
Mendoza, who said he accompanied<br />
the commissioner’s nephew<br />
to various canvass centers in<br />
Lanao and Cotabato from May<br />
12 to 18. There, he said, he saw<br />
Zuce speaking with provincial<br />
Comelec officials, following up<br />
election results with them, and<br />
giving them cash.<br />
Partial corroboration is also<br />
provided by the phone call the<br />
president made to Garcillano<br />
on May 29, where she is heard<br />
asking the commissioner if she<br />
would still get a one-million-vote<br />
lead. The commissioner said so<br />
far her lead was 980,000 “pero<br />
mag-compensate po sa Lanao<br />
‘yan (but we will compensate in<br />
Lanao),” as he was still expecting<br />
the poll results from seven more<br />
towns in Lanao del Sur.<br />
When he said that, Garcillano<br />
was either being prescient or he<br />
had already worked things out<br />
10 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
E L E C T I O N S 2 0 0 4<br />
on the ground. By the time that<br />
phone call was made, the initial<br />
results of the Lanao del Sur canvass<br />
had already been sent to<br />
Manila four days be<strong>for</strong>e. But in<br />
seven Lanao towns, the counting<br />
had been delayed, either<br />
because special elections needed<br />
to be called or allegedly because<br />
the canvassers were deliberately<br />
prolonging the count because of<br />
“special operations.” The results<br />
of the special elections, which<br />
were held on May 22 and June 5,<br />
were particularly suspicious. In<br />
Madalum, <strong>for</strong> example, Arroyo<br />
led Poe by 30 votes to one. The<br />
winning ratios in the special elections<br />
were far more scandalous<br />
than those in the earlier Lanao<br />
results: 4.5 votes <strong>for</strong> Arroyo <strong>for</strong><br />
every one of FPJ’s, even as the<br />
overall provincial ratio was only<br />
three votes to one. In all, the<br />
president got 30,447 votes in<br />
the special elections—enough<br />
to get her the one-million-vote<br />
lead. Poe, on the other hand got<br />
only 6,805.<br />
But Sumalipao, the Lanao del<br />
Sur election officer, is adamant.<br />
There was no way cheating<br />
could have taken place there,<br />
he says. “There were 50 lawyers<br />
there during the canvassing, 20<br />
from the opposition,” he says.<br />
“They were watching every time<br />
I opened a COC. How can I add<br />
or subtract votes? I am willing to<br />
be killed if they find even just<br />
one vote added to GMA or one<br />
vote taken from FPJ.”<br />
Namfrel’s Dalidig, who has<br />
been watching Lanao elections<br />
since 1992, is equally firm. He<br />
says that 2004 was the worst<br />
case of dagdag-bawas he has<br />
ever seen. The opposition could<br />
not prevent it, he says, because<br />
they didn’t have enough people<br />
to guard the count. “This is the<br />
worst, the dirtiest election.”<br />
governorship in 1998 but lost.<br />
In 2004, he founded the Lanao<br />
Unity Movement <strong>for</strong> Gloria<br />
Macapagal-Arroyo. Mike Arroyo<br />
was even there during the<br />
induction of its officers in April<br />
that year. Moner told “The Probe<br />
Team” he aligned himself with<br />
the Arroyos through the intercession<br />
of his brother-in-law, who<br />
was an assistant of Alfonso Cusi,<br />
a close friend of the First Gentleman<br />
and then general manager<br />
of the <strong>Philippine</strong> Ports Authority.<br />
He said his group volunteered to<br />
campaign <strong>for</strong> President Arroyo<br />
and to help her win in Muslim<br />
Mindanao.<br />
Abdul Wahab Batugan, a<br />
<strong>for</strong>mer Comelec election officer<br />
and Moner’s business partner in<br />
a consultancy firm, recounted<br />
that the judge had “assigned”<br />
him to Lanao del Sur during<br />
the counting. He recalled that<br />
on May 13, 2004, he and Moner<br />
went to Marawi to talk to election<br />
officers there about how to<br />
make the president win. “We<br />
talked to them para baliktarin<br />
yung COCs (to reverse the certificates<br />
of canvass),” he says.<br />
They also brought cash with<br />
them, money that they said was<br />
given to Moner by Cusi and the<br />
First Gentleman. For the Lanao<br />
del Sur operations, says Batugan,<br />
they distributed about P1 million<br />
in cash to elections personnel.<br />
“Yung iba, pagbigay namin ng<br />
pera, kami na nag-fill up…Kami<br />
na ang nagsulat ng numero<br />
sa COC (In some cases, after<br />
giving the money, we filled up<br />
the <strong>for</strong>ms ourselves, we wrote<br />
out the numbers in the COCs),”<br />
he said.<br />
Batugan admitted that it was<br />
in Marawi where they manufactured<br />
several COCs. “I remember<br />
the one in Wao,” he said in Tagalog.<br />
“I think it was 7,000 votes<br />
<strong>for</strong> FPJ and 3,000 plus <strong>for</strong> GMA.<br />
Tapos binaligtad. Nabaligtad.<br />
Ganu’n ang nangyari. (It was<br />
reversed. It got reversed. That’s<br />
what happened.)”<br />
The paper trail proves<br />
Batugan right. The precinctlevel<br />
election returns collected<br />
by Namfrel show that Poe got<br />
7,647 votes in Wao, while Mrs.<br />
Arroyo got only 3,816. But the<br />
ratio was indeed reversed in the<br />
certificate of canvass, where the<br />
president’s votes mysteriously<br />
doubled to 7,614, while Poe’s<br />
were reduced to only 4,967.<br />
The reason Batugan and his<br />
friends are talking now is that<br />
they feel betrayed. They said<br />
they took part in several dagdagbawas<br />
operations, not just in<br />
Lanao del Sur but also in other<br />
places in Muslim Mindanao.<br />
But more than a year after<br />
the elections, they had not<br />
yet been given the rewards<br />
they were promised. In fact, in<br />
September 2004, two members<br />
of the Lanao Unity Movement<br />
wrote Pampanga Rep. Juan<br />
Miguel ‘Mikey’ Arroyo, saying<br />
that during the canvassing, they<br />
had gone to Jolo “to facilitate<br />
and ensure that all votes be<br />
<strong>for</strong> PGMA in consideration <strong>for</strong><br />
an amount of money given to<br />
each BEI (board of election<br />
inspectors) and local election<br />
officer.”<br />
The letter also said that they<br />
had not been given much money<br />
<strong>for</strong> their ef<strong>for</strong>ts but they did the<br />
work because of the promise of<br />
government jobs. “But somehow,”<br />
the letter observed ruefully, “their<br />
dangerous role in PGMA victory as<br />
far as the two provinces of Lanao<br />
and Sulu are concerned” had not<br />
been duly rewarded.<br />
The letter was ignored.<br />
Meanwhile, the ghosts of the<br />
2004 elections haunt Lanao del<br />
Sur, and they refuse to rest.<br />
i<br />
With additional research by<br />
Avigail Olarte .<br />
PARALLEL<br />
OPERATIONS<br />
The extent of the vote-padding<br />
and shaving was probably due<br />
to the fact that more than one<br />
group was at work. Even as Garcillano<br />
and Zuce were per<strong>for</strong>ming<br />
their tasks, another group of<br />
operators, this one linked to the<br />
First Gentleman, was also operating<br />
in Lanao. The point man<br />
<strong>for</strong> this parallel operation was<br />
supposedly Moner, the shar’iah<br />
court judge who had become<br />
friendly with Mike Arroyo.<br />
Moner is a Maranao politician<br />
who ran <strong>for</strong> the Lanao del Sur<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
11
10 REASONS TO DOUBT THE<br />
YVONNE T. CHUA AND<br />
AVIGAIL OLARTE<br />
THE DEVIL is in<br />
the numbers.<br />
In the run-up to<br />
the 2004 elections,<br />
surveys predicted a<br />
neck-and-neck race<br />
between President<br />
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and<br />
leading opposition candidate<br />
Fernando Poe Jr. When the official<br />
canvassing closed, Arroyo<br />
got 40 percent of the votes, beating<br />
Poe by 3.5 percentage points.<br />
The legitimacy of Arroyo’s<br />
election has since come under<br />
question following the disclosure<br />
of the wiretapped<br />
conversations between her and<br />
<strong>for</strong>mer elections commissioner<br />
Virgilio Garcillano suggesting<br />
her knowledge and possible<br />
involvement in electoral fraud,<br />
including vote padding, and its<br />
<strong>cover</strong>-up. But there are other<br />
indicators that all was not well<br />
in last year’s elections. Election<br />
officials, experts, and observers<br />
point to numerous statistical<br />
improbabilities. Here is a<br />
list of at least 10 that indicate<br />
some people were naughty<br />
and not at all nice during the<br />
2004 polls:<br />
1<br />
1. Unusual jump in number of registered voters: The country’s population increases by<br />
roughly 2.3 percent each year. This means about five percent between 2002 and 2004.<br />
Yet, the Commission on Elections listed 43.5 million registered voters in the 2004<br />
elections, or a 15-percent jump over the 2002 figure. The Comelec has justified the<br />
unusual trend, saying there appeared to be a “heightened awareness/enthusiasm of<br />
voters to exercise suffrage.”<br />
2Province<br />
Election Year<br />
Increase (%)<br />
1998- 20<strong>01</strong>- 2002-<br />
Registered<br />
1998 20<strong>01</strong> 2002 2004<br />
20<strong>01</strong> 2002 2004<br />
voters 34,117,056 36,350,561 37,724,463 43,536,028 6.5 3.8 15.4<br />
2. Number of registered voters exceeds Comelec projections: In the provinces<br />
of Pampanga, Cebu, Iloilo, and Bohol, which delivered the largest chunks of<br />
the president’s winning margin over Poe, the number of registered voters in<br />
the end far exceeded the number of voters that Comelec expected to register.<br />
Projected Registered<br />
Voters<br />
Registered<br />
Voters*<br />
Increase (%)<br />
Pampanga 944,092 1,080,751 14<br />
Cebu 1,299,612 1,780,708 37<br />
Iloilo 787,580 923,262 17<br />
Bohol 556,579 619,139 11<br />
*Per provincial certificate of canvass<br />
4. Number of actual voters exceeds number of<br />
registered voters<br />
Municipality<br />
Sumisip, Basilan<br />
Panguntaran, Sulu<br />
55. Too popular outside bailiwick: For every<br />
Kapampangan who voted <strong>for</strong> Poe, 7.5 voted <strong>for</strong><br />
Arroyo. For every Cebuano who voted <strong>for</strong> Poe, 7.8<br />
voted <strong>for</strong> Arroyo. Historically, says <strong>Philippine</strong> Daily<br />
Inquirer columnist Conrado de Quiros, “(not) one<br />
of the past presidents has shown himself to be as<br />
popular, if not more so, in a province other than<br />
his own.” He cited as examples the late strongman<br />
Ferdinand Marcos who was strongest in the Ilocos<br />
and Arroyo’s own father, the late Diosdado Macapagal,<br />
who showed himself strongest in Pampanga.<br />
Province<br />
Pampanga<br />
Cebu<br />
Registered<br />
Voters<br />
22,669<br />
11,080<br />
Arroyo<br />
642,712<br />
965,630<br />
Actual<br />
Voters<br />
23,745<br />
11,468<br />
Poe<br />
84,720<br />
123,099<br />
33. Votes cast <strong>for</strong> all presidential candidates exceed actual voters.<br />
Province<br />
Registered<br />
Voters<br />
Actual Voters<br />
Votes <strong>for</strong><br />
President<br />
Official<br />
Voter<br />
Turnout<br />
Voter Turnout<br />
(President)<br />
Difference (%<br />
Points)<br />
Basilan 117,190 106,334 136,297 91% 116% 26<br />
Nueva Vizcaya 154,958 117,999 150,371 76% 97% 21<br />
Samar 284,485 228,075 278,045 80% 98% 18<br />
Aurora 77,669 61,475 73,194 79% 94% 15<br />
Isabela 607,209 465,181 515,974 77% 85% 8<br />
Albay 541,865 458,207 479,714 85% 89% 4<br />
Sultan Kudarat 313,7<strong>01</strong> 226,522 236,768 72% 75% 3<br />
North Cotabato 513,291 387,666 404,268 76% 79% 3<br />
Lanao del Norte 432,698 307,790 314,577 71% 73% 2<br />
12 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
2 0 0 4 E L E C T I O N S<br />
2004 ELECTION RESULTS<br />
6 7<br />
6. Zero vote <strong>for</strong> highly popular candidate: A 1966 Supreme Court<br />
ruling says a zero vote is statistically improbable. But the highly<br />
popular Poe failed to garner a single vote in a lot of places, including<br />
Sto. Tomas town in his home province of Pangasinan and in several<br />
Maguindanao municipalities where rival Arroyo’s total votes equaled<br />
the number of actual voters (another statistical improbability). Comelec<br />
Chair Benjamin Abalos Sr. has argued that while a zero vote may<br />
be highly improbable, it is still possible, and cited several factors like<br />
“Church influence, patriarchal dominance, guns, and gold” that could<br />
make it so. Asked about zero votes in last year’s elections, Garcillano<br />
told newsmen, “If there is a zero, that is possible because they<br />
could buy the watcher of the opposite side.”<br />
Municipality<br />
Sto. Tomas, Pangasinan<br />
Ampatuan, Maguindanao<br />
Datu Piang, Maguindanao<br />
88. Presidential candidate more popular than local candidate: In the<br />
South district of Cebu City, Arroyo turned out to be more popular than<br />
the local candidate, Rep. Antonio Cuenco.<br />
Candidate Votes Actual Voters % of Votes<br />
Obtained<br />
Arroyo 117,435 169,923 69%<br />
Cuenco 88,556 169,923 52%<br />
99. Unusually high winning ratio: Popularity-wise, Arroyo did not hold a candle to Poe. But in areas where she posted her biggest winning<br />
margins like Cebu, Arroyo led Poe by as much as 22 to one. By comparison, Poe’s lead over Arroyo was at most five times in places<br />
where he got his biggest winning margins. Election officials recall that Joseph Estrada, the runaway winner in the 1998 elections, led his<br />
closest opponent, Jose de Venecia, by five to one. Arroyo’s running mate, the extremely popular Noli de Castro, led Loren Legarda by only<br />
two to eight times in areas like Pampanga, Cebu, Iloilo, Bohol, Bukidnon, and Southern Leyte.<br />
ARROYO VS POE IN CEBU<br />
Municipality<br />
Catmon<br />
Alacsia<br />
Bogo<br />
Arroyo<br />
10,270<br />
8,629<br />
27,134<br />
Registered<br />
Voters<br />
6,737<br />
9,616<br />
17,688<br />
Poe<br />
459<br />
406<br />
1,523<br />
Actual Voters<br />
5,668<br />
9,321<br />
17,250<br />
Arroyo:Poe<br />
22:1<br />
21:1<br />
18:1<br />
10. Padding and shaving: New-media pioneer Roberto Verzola believes Arroyo did not win by 1.1 million votes. Using the Namfrel tally<br />
(based on elections returns) and the official count of Congress (based on Certificates of Canvass), he calculated Arroyo could have won by<br />
156,000 votes at most, or Poe by 84,000 votes. He said the Namfrel tally is “probably closer to the truth” because it is harder to tamper<br />
with 216,000-plus election returns than with 180 COCs. Congress said Arroyo posted a 3.5-percent margin over Poe, while the Namfrel tally<br />
placed this at 2.6 percent. The biggest discrepancies between the Namfrel and congressional counts were in Basilan, Sultan Kudarat, Lanao<br />
del Norte, Tawi-Tawi, Lanao del Sur, and Maguindanao.<br />
Arroyo<br />
5,470<br />
9,321<br />
17,250<br />
De Castro<br />
8,714<br />
7,902<br />
15,593<br />
Poe<br />
0<br />
0<br />
0<br />
Legarda<br />
1,520<br />
714<br />
8,502<br />
7. Votes <strong>for</strong> presidential candidate exceed votes <strong>for</strong> No. 1 senatorial<br />
candidate: Voters almost always write down names <strong>for</strong> senatorial<br />
and local posts on their ballots, but not necessarily make a<br />
selection <strong>for</strong> president. Also, voters can choose only one presidential<br />
candidate but can pick a dozen senatorial candidates at<br />
most. This makes it extremely rare <strong>for</strong> a presidential candidate to<br />
obtain more votes than the leading senatorial candidate. In Bohol,<br />
however, Arroyo garnered more votes than the leading senatorial<br />
candidate, including <strong>for</strong>mer Bohol representative Ernesto Herrera<br />
and Manuel Roxas III (who eventually topped the senatorial<br />
race), in 30 of 48 municipalities (60 percent). Ditto <strong>for</strong> Pampanga,<br />
bailiwick of both the president and Sen. Lito Lapid. Even in his<br />
hometown, Lapid had fewer votes than Arroyo. Similar patterns<br />
were detected in Iloilo, Siquijor, and Leyte provinces.<br />
BOHOL<br />
Municipality Arroyo Top Senate Bet Difference<br />
Anda 5,022 Roxas – 3,632 1,390<br />
Antequera 5,070 Herrera – 3,7<strong>01</strong> 1,369<br />
Carmen 12,420 Roxas – 9,166 3,254<br />
Catigbian 7,177 Roxas – 5,141 2,036<br />
Ubay 16,850 Roxas – 14,155 2,695<br />
PAMPANGA<br />
Municipality Arroyo Top Senate Bet Difference<br />
Floridablanca 31,399 Lapid - 28,448 2,951<br />
Guagua 38,205 Lapid - 34,246 3,959<br />
Lubao 45,085 Lapid - 39,617 5,468<br />
Porac 30,119 Lapid - 28,513 1,606<br />
De Castro:<br />
Legarda<br />
6:1<br />
11:1<br />
2:1<br />
POE VS ARROYO IN LAGUNA<br />
Municipality<br />
Mabitac<br />
Magdalena<br />
Pagsanjan<br />
Poe Arroyo Poe:<br />
Arroyo<br />
5,742<br />
6,589<br />
10,065<br />
1,186<br />
1,420<br />
1,978<br />
5:1<br />
5:1<br />
5:1<br />
Region<br />
ARMM<br />
C. Mindanao<br />
CAR<br />
Congress<br />
Arroyo<br />
%<br />
61.9<br />
32.2<br />
39.5<br />
Poe<br />
%<br />
30.6<br />
39.2<br />
26.1<br />
Arroyo<br />
%<br />
38.8<br />
24<br />
38<br />
Namfrel<br />
Poe<br />
%<br />
58<br />
44.5<br />
28.6<br />
Discrepancy<br />
%<br />
50.5<br />
13.5<br />
4.1<br />
Region<br />
Sulu*<br />
Basilan**<br />
Tawi-Tawi***<br />
Congress<br />
78,429 60,807 23,896<br />
79,702 48,685 12,162<br />
33,634 49,803 15,925<br />
Namfrel<br />
Arroyo Poe Arroyo Poe<br />
45,740<br />
43,821<br />
58,292<br />
*100% Namfrel <strong>cover</strong>age **
Impervious to<br />
change. Despite all<br />
the controversies<br />
that have hounded<br />
Comelec, the poll<br />
body is resisting<br />
re<strong>for</strong>m.<br />
CAN COMELEC<br />
REFORM?<br />
ALECKS P. PABICO<br />
ANYONE STILL<br />
wondering why<br />
Pinoys are voting<br />
with their feet<br />
and heading <strong>for</strong><br />
abroad in droves<br />
only has to look<br />
at the “Hello, Garci” scandal that<br />
exposed an alleged plot to rig<br />
the 2004 elections in President<br />
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s favor.<br />
For those who still need convincing<br />
that this country’s electoral<br />
system is a mess, as Exhibit<br />
B we have the Commission on<br />
Elections (Comelec), which has<br />
so far been largely mum on the<br />
scandal that has even prompted<br />
one of its <strong>for</strong>mer officials to go<br />
missing. And that’s on top of a<br />
series of questionable acts of<br />
commission and omission it has<br />
been doing <strong>for</strong> years.<br />
This is why even be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
President Arroyo thought of<br />
calling up then Commissioner<br />
Virgilio Garcillano at the height<br />
of the canvassing of votes last<br />
year, civil-society organizations<br />
were already pushing hard <strong>for</strong><br />
far-reaching electoral re<strong>for</strong>ms.<br />
They wanted to start with the<br />
Comelec, but its leaders just<br />
wouldn’t budge—and one year<br />
and one regime-shaking scandal<br />
later, they still aren’t moving.<br />
That means any change in the<br />
system is also at a standstill. Says<br />
an exasperated Akbayan partylist<br />
Rep. Etta Rosales: “(When)<br />
you speak of electoral re<strong>for</strong>ms,<br />
the Comelec will have to be integral<br />
to the re<strong>for</strong>m ef<strong>for</strong>t since<br />
one of the first things you have<br />
to re<strong>for</strong>m is Comelec itself.”<br />
Still, it’s not as if other branches<br />
of government shouldn’t get<br />
off their duffs, too. A conservative<br />
Congress, <strong>for</strong> example, is<br />
definitely in the way of electoral<br />
re<strong>for</strong>ms. Many initiatives require<br />
legislation and constitutional<br />
amendments. For instance,<br />
several of the recommendations<br />
made by the Consortium <strong>for</strong><br />
Election and Political Process<br />
Strengthening (CEPPS) mission<br />
that monitored the 2004 elections<br />
require a drastic overhaul of the<br />
Comelec’s legal and constitutional<br />
framework. These include:<br />
• making the Comelec a<br />
purely administrative entity;<br />
• doing away with the con-<br />
gressional canvass of presidential<br />
and vice-presidential votes,<br />
since the counting and tabulation<br />
is the responsibility of the<br />
election administration;<br />
• removing from the Comelec<br />
its quasi-judicial function of<br />
deciding on electoral protests,<br />
a function which can be taken<br />
up by special electoral tribunals;<br />
and<br />
• restructuring the composition<br />
of the House and Senate<br />
electoral tribunals so as not<br />
to expose the process to bias,<br />
real or perceived.<br />
Since its reconstitution in<br />
1987, however, Congress has<br />
consistently sat on vital <strong>political</strong><br />
and electoral re<strong>for</strong>ms that could<br />
have at the very least arrested<br />
the degeneration of a system<br />
of government that Arroyo and<br />
House Speaker Jose de Venecia<br />
now rue about and conveniently<br />
want replaced.<br />
THWARTED IN<br />
CONGRESS<br />
For example, a re<strong>for</strong>m-minded<br />
legislature should have long<br />
passed the anti-dynasty bill,<br />
which was introduced as early<br />
as the Eighth Congress, to fully<br />
enable the constitutional provision<br />
that bans <strong>political</strong> dynasties.<br />
Such a law has not been enacted<br />
since many Congress members<br />
come from long lines of <strong>political</strong><br />
families who refuse to legislate<br />
themselves out of public office.<br />
Also still pending in the<br />
legislature is what <strong>political</strong><br />
and electoral re<strong>for</strong>m advocates<br />
consider as the most essential<br />
piece of legislation, the Political<br />
Party Re<strong>for</strong>m Act, which was<br />
introduced in 2003 in the 12th<br />
Congress. The law seeks to provide<br />
the needed impetus <strong>for</strong> the<br />
development of parties based<br />
on plat<strong>for</strong>ms and programs,<br />
rather than on individuals and<br />
influence. Among its salient<br />
provisions are:<br />
• regulating the conduct of<br />
<strong>political</strong> parties, including the<br />
selection of leaders by party<br />
congress;<br />
• minimum funding by the<br />
state to duly registered national<br />
parties;<br />
• regulating campaign financing<br />
and spending, including<br />
restricting individual campaign<br />
contributions;<br />
• banning “turncoatism” or the<br />
rampant practice of switching<br />
<strong>political</strong> affiliation that weakens<br />
party structures, confuses<br />
voters, and undermines the<br />
concept of a viable opposition<br />
(An anti-turncoatism bill<br />
was first filed in the Eighth<br />
Congress.)<br />
For a bill certified as urgent<br />
by the Legislative Executive<br />
Development Advisory Council<br />
(LEDAC), only one hearing has<br />
so far been conducted by the<br />
Senate committee chaired by<br />
Sen. Richard Gordon, while it<br />
still has to be calendared by the<br />
House committee chaired by<br />
Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr.<br />
And while another important<br />
law, the Party List System Act,<br />
was passed in 1995, it was a<br />
compromised piece of legislation.<br />
No less than the Supreme<br />
Court pointed out its basic flaws:<br />
the prohibitive existing threshold<br />
of two percent leaving congressional<br />
seats vacant, and its lack<br />
of any clearly defined eligibility<br />
criteria. Since being introduced<br />
in August 2004, amendments to<br />
the law, which include clarifying<br />
eligibility requirements, lowering<br />
the threshold to 1.8 percent, and<br />
increasing the maximum number<br />
14 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
R E F O R M I N G E L E C T I O N S<br />
NEED FOR SOCIAL<br />
SOLUTION<br />
For IT pioneer Roberto Verzola,<br />
the issue is not so much technical<br />
as it is social. Hence, the<br />
electoral re<strong>for</strong>m campaign battlecry<br />
must be first and <strong>for</strong>emost<br />
to punish the election cheats.<br />
“Cheating in elections is a social<br />
problem,” he argues. “So this<br />
needs a social solution, not just<br />
technical. Of course, there are<br />
technical problems in the election<br />
process like the slow count,<br />
transmission of results, and there<br />
are technical solutions <strong>for</strong> that.”<br />
But until the election cheats are<br />
punished, Verzola insists, even<br />
a computerized system will not<br />
ensure clean and orderly polls.<br />
Firm believers in the buof<br />
seats per party from three to<br />
six, have reached the committee<br />
level only this May.<br />
Rosales says she was<br />
surprised that the party-list<br />
representation was not part<br />
of the draft of constitutional<br />
change proposals in the House.<br />
“They say it’s because we are<br />
introducing amendments to<br />
the Party List Law already,”<br />
she says. “That’s true, but the<br />
amendments that we are doing<br />
are with the law, not with<br />
the constitutional provision.<br />
There are really ef<strong>for</strong>ts to gloss<br />
over or give lesser priority to<br />
re<strong>for</strong>ms. They would rather<br />
have the status quo, rather than<br />
democratize.”<br />
With another mid-term elections<br />
scheduled in 2007, the<br />
election modernization and<br />
automation law also has to be<br />
amended. Points out Gus Lagman,<br />
technology chief of the<br />
National Citizens’ Movement<br />
<strong>for</strong> Free Elections (Namfrel):<br />
“There’s a real sense of urgency<br />
since in 18 months, we’ll have<br />
another round of elections. RA<br />
8436 requires a lot of amendments.<br />
The bidding process<br />
will take at least six months.<br />
And that does not include voter<br />
education.”<br />
But Lagman is pessimistic<br />
about anything substantial being<br />
done with the present crop of<br />
election commissioners. “We tried<br />
talking to them,” he says. “It’s useless.<br />
Iba ang frame of mind.”<br />
A FLAWED APPOINT-<br />
MENT PROCESS<br />
Ah, yes, the Comelec and its<br />
commissioners. As early as<br />
June, electoral-re<strong>for</strong>m advocates<br />
have been demanding<br />
the courtesy resignations of<br />
all the commissioners. At the<br />
minimum, the call has been to<br />
get rid of those who have been<br />
guilty of violating their responsibilities<br />
and oaths of office.<br />
But <strong>for</strong>mer Comelec chairman<br />
Christian Monsod even goes as<br />
far as suggesting current chief<br />
Benjamin Abalos Sr. should<br />
be shown the door through<br />
the most expedient means<br />
possible, including through<br />
impeachment, because “a re<strong>for</strong>m<br />
program is at great risk<br />
of not being achieved while<br />
he’s there.”<br />
Since Day One, though,<br />
Abalos has resisted calls <strong>for</strong><br />
him to step down, arguing that<br />
the fault of one is not the fault<br />
of everybody. Moreover, as a<br />
constitutional body, the Comelec<br />
is less accountable to the<br />
other branches of government<br />
and the public, as the commissioners<br />
can be removed only<br />
through an impeachment process.<br />
Un<strong>for</strong>tunately, impeaching<br />
the commissioners is not an<br />
inviting prospect at this time,<br />
especially after what happened<br />
to the impeachment complaints<br />
against Arroyo.<br />
Rosales, who was among the<br />
first 41 House members who endorsed<br />
the amended complaint<br />
against Arroyo, says, “It was a<br />
very negative experience. After<br />
that, nobody will stand up in<br />
Congress to try to impeach an<br />
impeachable official.”<br />
Some also see a problem<br />
with the resignation call since<br />
the appointing authority remains<br />
the same official alleged to have<br />
benefited from electoral fraud. In<br />
July, Arroyo appointed Romeo<br />
Brawner, the <strong>for</strong>mer Court of<br />
Appeals presiding justice, to<br />
replace Garcillano. Word has<br />
it that she will be reappointing<br />
Manuel Barcelona Jr. to the other<br />
vacant post—unpalatable news<br />
to re<strong>for</strong>mists, as Barcelona was a<br />
member of a pro-Arroyo organization<br />
that had contributed to<br />
the president’s campaign.<br />
“The problem with the<br />
whole appointment process is<br />
that the president is the sole<br />
appointing power,” says Ramon<br />
Casiple, executive director of<br />
the Institute <strong>for</strong> Political and<br />
Electoral Re<strong>for</strong>m (IPER). “It’s not<br />
like in the judiciary where you<br />
have the Judicial and Bar Council.<br />
Whatever name we give to<br />
Malacañang, those whom you’ve<br />
never heard of are the ones who<br />
are appointed.”<br />
What makes the appointment<br />
issue even more pressing<br />
is that by next year, two<br />
commissioners—Mehol Sadain<br />
and Rufino Javier—are also<br />
up <strong>for</strong> retirement. Casiple says<br />
that especially at this juncture<br />
when the Comelec badly needs<br />
to modernize, premium should<br />
be on appointees that do not<br />
only have the integrity but are<br />
relatively young, IT-proficient,<br />
and preferably possessed with<br />
managerial skills.<br />
At 70, Justice Brawner, while<br />
a man of integrity, is deficient in<br />
such requirements, says Casiple.<br />
“He also has no background in<br />
electoral processes,” adds IPER’s<br />
head. “While he may be learned<br />
in the law, I don’t know if he can<br />
run an election without going<br />
through a learning curve.”<br />
Some commissioners in fact<br />
are pinning much of their re<strong>for</strong>m<br />
hopes on a more tech-savvy<br />
Comelec. The soon-to-be-retired<br />
Sadain, <strong>for</strong> one, says, “We<br />
had very bright prospects in<br />
implementing electoral re<strong>for</strong>ms,<br />
especially with computerization<br />
that we had wanted to be implemented<br />
last year.” But somehow<br />
the commission bungled that,<br />
too, in the process losing P2.3<br />
billion of taxpayers’ money.<br />
reaucracy like Monsod, however,<br />
want to give re<strong>for</strong>ms a chance<br />
even on a piecemeal basis.<br />
Monsod likes to hark back to the<br />
1992 elections when the Comelec<br />
had a net approval rating of<br />
+64, a testament he says that it is<br />
possible to re<strong>for</strong>m even the most<br />
damaged of institutions.<br />
Besides, those pushing <strong>for</strong><br />
changes acknowledge that there<br />
are many honest people within<br />
the poll body who want to do<br />
right. “We have to think of ways<br />
by which we can bring back<br />
courage,” says <strong>for</strong>mer education<br />
undersecretary Chito Gascon.<br />
“That’s what we lack now, the<br />
courage of the people who<br />
know the facts. The enemies<br />
are throwing the book, rule of<br />
law, due process as mechanisms<br />
to prevent us from un<strong>cover</strong>ing<br />
the truth.”<br />
Comelec officials like Ferdinand<br />
Rafanan, election director<br />
<strong>for</strong> the National Capital Region,<br />
are already doing their share to<br />
clean up the process. On its own<br />
initiative, the NCR regional office<br />
has placed special emphasis on<br />
voter education. Begun just this<br />
July, the modest ef<strong>for</strong>ts, with<br />
no funding or material support<br />
of any kind from the national<br />
office, have so far been able to<br />
reach senior high school and<br />
college students in nine Metro<br />
Manila schools.<br />
Though targeted at students,<br />
Comelec-NCR’s voters’ education<br />
program is also intended to<br />
deliver the message to Comelec<br />
personnel about the proper conduct<br />
of elections, the nature of<br />
their work, and what tasks are<br />
required of them. NCR personnel<br />
are thus being reintroduced to<br />
their profession, getting training<br />
on how to satisfy voters’ needs,<br />
use computers and modernize<br />
work processes, and eliminate<br />
graft and corruption in the issuance<br />
of certified copies of<br />
documents.<br />
Yet while these are laudable<br />
ef<strong>for</strong>ts and have their place<br />
in the pursuit of <strong>political</strong> and<br />
electoral re<strong>for</strong>ms, the magnitude<br />
of the problem is such that<br />
re<strong>for</strong>m advocates have their<br />
eyes set more on long-term,<br />
structural changes. As Byron<br />
Bocar, Rosales’s chief-of-staff,<br />
puts it, “Elections are held only<br />
once every three years. But bad<br />
governance arising from a bad<br />
electoral system occurs day to<br />
day. We’re witness to its fatal<br />
results.”<br />
i<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
15
Fighting corruption. The military<br />
and the police are considered<br />
among the most corrupt state<br />
agencies, but there are re<strong>for</strong>mers<br />
within, including members of the<br />
Christian Officers Re<strong>for</strong>m the<br />
Police Service (CORPS) below.<br />
OFFICERS<br />
WHO SAY NO<br />
LUZ RIMBAN<br />
HI S J O B t i t l e<br />
was impressive<br />
enough: aide de<br />
camp and executive<br />
assistant to<br />
the interior and<br />
local gover n-<br />
ment secretary. It was, however,<br />
a deskbound posting that<br />
consisted mostly of shuffling<br />
documents needing his boss’s<br />
signature. That was a decade<br />
ago, and Cesar Binag was then<br />
a young police captain fresh<br />
from a stint with the elite Special<br />
Action Force (SAF) that battled<br />
coup plotters and insurgents. To<br />
Binag, who was trained in the<br />
Philipppine Military Academy<br />
(PMA), his new assignment was<br />
boring. Or at least that’s how it<br />
seemed at first.<br />
One day a friend invited him<br />
<strong>for</strong> dinner. Binag quickly accepted,<br />
perhaps thinking it was<br />
going to be a nice break from<br />
the drudgery of his job. Instead,<br />
his friend served up a temptation,<br />
a situation Binag would<br />
find himself in repeatedly.<br />
When his friend turned up,<br />
he had in tow a <strong>for</strong>eign businessman<br />
with an eye on a<br />
P250-million contract the department<br />
was bidding out. The<br />
businessman’s proposition was<br />
simple: Binag would provide a<br />
copy of a document detailing the<br />
contract’s specifications, thereby<br />
giving the <strong>for</strong>eigner an edge in<br />
the bidding war. In exchange,<br />
Binag would get 1.5 percent of<br />
the contract budget, or P3.75<br />
million. Half that amount was<br />
his <strong>for</strong> the taking right there and<br />
then, if he accepted.<br />
“Politely I said to them, ‘I<br />
cannot do that,’” recounts Binag,<br />
now in his late 30s. “So I called<br />
the waiter, paid my bill, and<br />
then left.”<br />
Not everyone would have<br />
reacted the same way Binag<br />
did. Indeed, others would<br />
have grabbed this chance of a<br />
lifetime. After all, the public<br />
sees the police <strong>for</strong>ce as a corrupt<br />
organization and a policeman<br />
as an officer making easy<br />
money extorting a few hundred<br />
pesos from motorists on the<br />
streets. How could a policeman<br />
resist a bribe that was almost<br />
P4 million?<br />
Binag isn’t exactly a rebel<br />
or a maverick but it seems the<br />
country’s armed services do<br />
have their share of officers who<br />
know how to just say no. For a<br />
time, this had been hard <strong>for</strong> the<br />
public even to imagine, espe-<br />
16 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
R E F O R M I N T H E B A R R A C K S<br />
cially after the media exposé on<br />
Gen. Carlos Garcia, the <strong>for</strong>mer<br />
armed <strong>for</strong>ces comptroller who<br />
has landed in jail <strong>for</strong> amassing<br />
wealth beyond the imagination<br />
even of a military man. But since<br />
Brig. Gen. Francisco Gudani appeared<br />
be<strong>for</strong>e the Senate Committee<br />
on National Defense to<br />
expose <strong>political</strong> maneuverings<br />
in the fraud-ridden 2004 elections,<br />
the public has become<br />
reacquainted with the idea that<br />
there could be more than a few<br />
good men in organizations as<br />
tainted with corruption as the<br />
<strong>Philippine</strong> National Police (PNP)<br />
and the Armed Forces of the<br />
<strong>Philippine</strong>s (AFP).<br />
“I am here as assistant superintendent<br />
of the PMA where we<br />
teach the cadets the honor code,<br />
that a cadet does not cheat, does<br />
not steal, does not lie nor tolerate<br />
these things,” Gudani said at<br />
the Senate in September. The<br />
general also made it a point to<br />
identify himself as the president<br />
of the Military Christian Fellowship<br />
(MCF), a loose grouping of<br />
Christians in the AFP. With that,<br />
he allowed civilians a peek at<br />
another way in which idealists in<br />
armed services have managed to<br />
hold up against the entrenched<br />
corruption within and pressures<br />
from politicians without.<br />
Gudani earned praise from<br />
some civilians who thought<br />
he did the right thing. That he<br />
placed himself in peril, defying<br />
a presidential order against military<br />
officers appearing be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
congressional inquiries only<br />
added an aura of heroism to his<br />
Senate appearance.<br />
Gudani has said he simply did<br />
not get the Malacañang order in<br />
time. Be that as it may, he would<br />
not have been the first idealist in<br />
the military faced with a moral<br />
dilemma. In the past, soldiers<br />
who felt strongly against an order<br />
or questionable practices had<br />
quit or gone AWOL. Others have<br />
tried to stage coups or mutinies.<br />
Because the structure does not<br />
provide support <strong>for</strong> those who<br />
want to remain upright and honest,<br />
in the end those who prevail<br />
are the men and women with<br />
strong moral fiber. For many,<br />
this <strong>for</strong>titude to withstand temptation<br />
comes largely from a very<br />
deep sense of patriotism. For<br />
others, such love of country is<br />
enhanced by the moral conviction<br />
provided by the teachings<br />
of their elders or coming from<br />
their respective faiths.<br />
HONOR AND LOYALTY<br />
Officers who graduated from the<br />
PMA are supposed to be guided<br />
by the honor code to help them<br />
remain on the right path. But<br />
then they also swear by an oath<br />
of loyalty authored by the 19 th -<br />
century U.S. publisher and writer<br />
Elbert Hubbard. It says: “If you<br />
work <strong>for</strong> a man, in heaven’s<br />
name work <strong>for</strong> him. Speak well<br />
of him and stand by the institution<br />
he represents. Remember<br />
an ounce of loyalty is worth<br />
a pound of cleverness. If you<br />
growl, condemn and eternally<br />
find fault, resign your position.<br />
And when you are outside,<br />
damn to your hearts’ content.<br />
But <strong>for</strong> as long as you are part of<br />
the institution, do not condemn<br />
it. If you do, the first high wind<br />
that comes along will blow you<br />
away, and you will probably<br />
never know why.”<br />
The oath is a pledge of submission<br />
used all over the world<br />
in various organizations, such<br />
as the U.S. Federal Bureau of<br />
Investigation (FBI), and by superiors<br />
and bosses to en<strong>for</strong>ce what<br />
some people say is blind loyalty.<br />
Explicit in the oath is a promise<br />
not to blow the whistle on an<br />
organization to which one belongs.<br />
It seems to clash with the<br />
PMA honor code, which tacitly<br />
urges officers to speak out when<br />
they witness wrongdoing.<br />
There is a lot wrong in the<br />
PNP, as there is with the AFP<br />
and the rest of the government.<br />
Aside from graft and corruption,<br />
there is also what Binag calls<br />
“bata-bata” system or higher ups<br />
playing favorites among their<br />
subordinates. There are the<br />
dilemmas over jueteng, the illegal<br />
numbers game from which<br />
it is said police officers enrich<br />
themselves by offering protection<br />
from the law.<br />
Binag, now a superintendent<br />
and chief of the PNP’s resource<br />
re<strong>for</strong>m unit, is a born-again<br />
Christian. When he talks about<br />
“conversion,” though, he means<br />
not the welcoming of a newcomer<br />
to his faith, but the practice of<br />
transferring or realigning funds<br />
intended <strong>for</strong> other purposes<br />
that in the process often end up<br />
in the pockets of corrupt officers.<br />
Conversion was one of the<br />
main problems exposed by the<br />
group of discontented junior<br />
AFP officers who laid siege to<br />
the Oakwood Hotel in Makati<br />
in July 2003.<br />
“Here, if you partake of free<br />
lunch, I believe you’re part of the<br />
system because strictly the budget<br />
has no room <strong>for</strong> a free lunch,”<br />
Binag points out. ”Somewhere<br />
along the way, one item was<br />
converted into another item and<br />
that’s why it became lunch.”<br />
Army Lt. Col. Amadeo Azul<br />
feels the same way about conversion<br />
in the Armed Forces.<br />
Marching to a different rhythm.<br />
Police Supt. Cesar Binag<br />
(above) has turned down bribes<br />
and believes that it is possible<br />
to make the police a more<br />
accountable institution.<br />
Many years ago, as a young<br />
lieutenant, he had rebuked his<br />
“goodhearted” commandant <strong>for</strong><br />
converting an item in the budget<br />
into a P1,000 Christmas bonus<br />
<strong>for</strong> the staff. He was told, “ I<br />
wish everyone were like you but<br />
I’m only doing this to boost the<br />
morale.” Unlike the rest of the<br />
staff, Azul wound up with no<br />
bonus; he was also left worrying<br />
that while such gestures are<br />
well meant, they could also be<br />
openings <strong>for</strong> serious transgressions<br />
later on.<br />
Azul, also a born-again Christian,<br />
says he is not cut out to<br />
be a whistleblower or to wash<br />
the AFP’s dirty linen in public.<br />
“The Bible says if your brother<br />
commits a mistake, go to him,<br />
rebuke him. If he does not listen,<br />
bring another…tell it to the whole<br />
church,” he said. That frame of<br />
mind has led him away from<br />
antagonistic confrontations with<br />
wrongdoers, and even the military<br />
practice of humiliating subordinates<br />
in public. Over time,<br />
he said, he has learned to choose<br />
whom to criticize and how, quoting<br />
another biblical passage:<br />
“Rebuke a wise man and he will<br />
be wiser. Rebuke a wicked man<br />
and he will hate you.”<br />
The dilemmas can be tormenting<br />
<strong>for</strong> soldiers striving to<br />
live upright lives, like Azul. That<br />
is why when Azul was contacted<br />
<strong>for</strong> this story he declined to<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
17
R E F O R M I N T H E B A R R A C K S<br />
be interviewed at first. Azul<br />
was once the secretary of the<br />
MCF. Azul is also a member of<br />
PMA Class of 1983, which also<br />
produced Lt. Col. Alexander<br />
Balutan, the Marine officer who<br />
testified with Gudani at the Senate.<br />
Azul taught physics at the<br />
Academy and was at one point<br />
battalion commander of the<br />
Army’s 64th Infantry Batallion<br />
in Samar. He is currently posted<br />
at J5, the plans office of the AFP<br />
General Headquarters in Camp<br />
Aguinaldo.<br />
Azul agreed to talk to PCIJ<br />
only outside his office and on<br />
a Sunday at a church where he<br />
attends service. It is a gleaming<br />
glass-and-steel structure that<br />
looks like the headquarters<br />
of a conglomerate. Its pastors<br />
look like yuppies. In these surroundings<br />
and out of his uni<strong>for</strong>m,<br />
Azul himself looked like<br />
a young businessman taking<br />
a hard-earned respite. And he<br />
talked more as a Christian than<br />
as a soldier.<br />
“The hard part is the battle<br />
within,” said Azul. The challenges,<br />
he said, range from resisting<br />
the martial culture that automatically<br />
insists on applying hardline<br />
solutions to social problems, and<br />
vices that machos in the military<br />
are known <strong>for</strong>, such as womanizing<br />
and drinking.<br />
Speaking one’s mind, even<br />
in the name of the teachings<br />
of the Gospel, can have grave<br />
repercussions in the military.<br />
An officer can get relieved of<br />
his post or court-martialed as<br />
in Gudani’s case, or he can be<br />
totally ignored, bypassed, or<br />
misunderstood.<br />
Azul talked of looking at<br />
things now from a different<br />
perspective. Where be<strong>for</strong>e he<br />
would turn bitter over reprisals<br />
from higher-ups <strong>for</strong> what his<br />
Christian faith made him do,<br />
he now would rather act as a<br />
bridge between two seemingly<br />
incompatible paradigms.<br />
A BALANCING ACT<br />
In truth, being a spiritual person<br />
on the one hand and being soldiers<br />
and policemen on the other<br />
can sometimes mean walking a<br />
perilous tightrope. But both Azul<br />
and Binag seem to have found a<br />
com<strong>for</strong>table balance. Both deny<br />
being purists, but talk of re<strong>for</strong>ming<br />
long-entrenched flaws in<br />
their organizations bit by bit, and<br />
mostly by infecting their respective<br />
“spheres of influence.”<br />
Today Azul says he has a<br />
chance to effect some change<br />
by helping <strong>for</strong>mulate planning<br />
and budgeting policies in the<br />
AFP. Budgets used to be drawn<br />
up by office-bound people who<br />
had no idea of the needs out in<br />
the field where conditions are<br />
fluid. The practice used to be<br />
that budgets were drawn up just<br />
to access the fund and didn’t reflect<br />
the realities in the field. As<br />
a result, money was set aside <strong>for</strong><br />
uses not suited to war zones and<br />
had to be converted later into<br />
purchases of what the men in<br />
the trenches did need—that is,<br />
if abusive commanders weren’t<br />
pocketing the funds.<br />
The present AFP is trying to<br />
implement a budgeting system<br />
that Azul described as “rationalizing<br />
resource allocation and<br />
ensuring it goes to the right uses”<br />
and a mechanism where planning<br />
and budgeting are “properly<br />
linked.” If it works well,<br />
conversion would be radically<br />
minimized, unless one happened<br />
to be really corrupt.<br />
If Azul talks like a manager,<br />
it is also because he has had<br />
postgraduate management training,<br />
as did Binag and his friends<br />
in their Christian group called<br />
CORPS, an acronym <strong>for</strong> Christian<br />
Officers Re<strong>for</strong>m the Police Service.<br />
Binag’s friends in CORPS<br />
have become his refuge and<br />
“accountability” group where<br />
they check on each other’s<br />
spiritual, moral, and professional<br />
difficulties<br />
It helps that officers like Azul<br />
and Binag took up management<br />
studies in institutions such as the<br />
University of the <strong>Philippine</strong>s, the<br />
Asian Institute of Management, or<br />
even schools overseas, where they<br />
were exposed to better and more<br />
effective ways of doing things.<br />
Binag, who has run the range<br />
of police duties from being<br />
police station commander to<br />
heading the PNP’s Traffic Management<br />
Group, likewise talks<br />
about having ordered time-andmotion<br />
studies to identify bottlenecks<br />
in the PNP units where<br />
he has been posted. He says<br />
leadership trainings are passing<br />
on effective management styles<br />
to potential young leaders in<br />
PNP offices where re<strong>for</strong>ms are<br />
most needed. CORPS also has<br />
a mentoring program called<br />
“My Brother’s Keeper” and the<br />
“Bless Our Cops” campaign that<br />
invites the public to support<br />
policemen.<br />
RESTORING HOPE,<br />
IMPLEMENTING<br />
REFORMS<br />
But a major obstacle has been<br />
the attitude of despair the public<br />
and even some PNP members<br />
have toward re<strong>for</strong>m. Binag’s<br />
only request to classmates, civic<br />
leaders, and fellow policemen<br />
is, “Don’t lose hope.” Because<br />
re<strong>for</strong>ms are grounded on the<br />
hope and the desire that things<br />
will change, Binag says, the first<br />
step is to restore hope.<br />
“Hope is not a method,” he<br />
says. “We’ve got to do something<br />
to operationalize hope. But it’s<br />
hard to say how if you don’t<br />
have hope.”<br />
Shooting <strong>for</strong> the moon?<br />
Re<strong>for</strong>mers believe it is<br />
possible to bring back honor<br />
and integrity to the military<br />
and the police.<br />
Azul, though, said things are<br />
looking up in Camp Aguinaldo,<br />
adding that re<strong>for</strong>ms were being<br />
instituted even be<strong>for</strong>e the Oakwood<br />
mutiny broke out, and even<br />
despite such cases as that of Gen.<br />
Garcia, himself a PMA alumnus.<br />
“The military is far, far better<br />
off now than it was in 1983<br />
when I was a 2nd lieutenant,” he<br />
said. In those days, there were<br />
no limits to drinking, and parties<br />
<strong>for</strong> officers even had Girard-Peter<br />
models in attendance. Today<br />
there are mechanisms to air grievances,<br />
among them the campaign<br />
“Text Mo Si Commander” where<br />
soldiers in<strong>for</strong>m higher-ups of<br />
their problem. Higher ups are<br />
also listening to junior officers a<br />
lot more, a far cry from 20 years<br />
ago when “lieutenants were seen<br />
and not heard.” Top-down, bottom-up<br />
monitoring and reporting<br />
makes the organization more<br />
cohesive and a coup d’etat less<br />
probable, Azul said.<br />
Binag, too, doesn’t think a<br />
revolt is in the offing. But that’s<br />
because he earned his spurs<br />
defending the government.<br />
After all, in the SAF, which he<br />
had joined right after graduating<br />
from the PMA in 1987, he and<br />
his co-recruits were almost immediately<br />
fighting off coups that<br />
rocked the Aquino administration<br />
during its early years.<br />
Being in the frontlines defending<br />
the government comes<br />
naturally to men like Binag.<br />
What comes naturally to other<br />
members of the PNP and the<br />
AFP, however, may not necessarily<br />
be the same.<br />
i<br />
18 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
REPORTING<br />
UNDER<br />
THE GUN<br />
Fearing <strong>for</strong> her life.<br />
Journalist Mei Magsino-<br />
Lubis is on the run,<br />
fleeing threats from the<br />
most powerful man in<br />
her province.<br />
VINIA DATINGUINOO<br />
MELINDA ‘MEI’<br />
Magsino-Lubis<br />
yearns <strong>for</strong><br />
many things:<br />
her flower and<br />
herb garden,<br />
the sound of<br />
her husband’s voice, the kingfisher<br />
and maya birds that used to wake<br />
her up in the morning. All these<br />
she used to enjoy in her five-hectare<br />
mahogany farm on top of a<br />
hill, in the city of Batangas, around<br />
84 km. south of Manila.<br />
Even now her farm beckons<br />
to her like the smell of freshly<br />
brewed barako coffee. “It was<br />
paradise,” she says, “and it was<br />
my home.”<br />
But the farm—and husband—<br />
will have to wait, because Magsino-Lubis<br />
wants to live. She is<br />
convinced that had she not fled<br />
from Batangas one night last July<br />
she would now be dead.<br />
Magsino-Lubis is a correspondent<br />
of the <strong>Philippine</strong> Daily<br />
Inquirer <strong>for</strong> the Southern Luzon<br />
region and has been reporting<br />
on alleged irregularities in the<br />
Batangas provincial capitol. She<br />
believes her life is now in danger<br />
because her stories have angered<br />
the provincial governor, whom<br />
she has linked to questionable<br />
projects, among other things.<br />
The governor is Armando<br />
C. Sanchez. In Senate hearings<br />
probing jueteng, he was alleged<br />
to be one of the biggest operators<br />
of the illegal numbers game<br />
in the country. He also faces a<br />
graft case filed in the Office of<br />
the Ombudsman by his vice<br />
governor. Recently, the influential<br />
Roman Catholic Church<br />
leadership in Batangas openly<br />
declared its lack of confidence in<br />
the governor. (See sidebar) Yet,<br />
while he has the demeanor of a<br />
street toughie, Sanchez does not<br />
have a reputation <strong>for</strong> resorting to<br />
violence when dealing with his<br />
perceived enemies—at least not<br />
among the general public.<br />
But that is getting way ahead<br />
of Magsino-Lubis’s story.<br />
PHONED WARNING<br />
At around 10 in the evening of<br />
July 7 this year, Magsino-Lubis<br />
received a phone call from one of<br />
her police sources. She was told<br />
two prisoners from the provincial<br />
jail had just been released, with<br />
specific orders to kill her. She<br />
would have to leave Batangas<br />
immediately, her source said.<br />
That same night, Magsino-<br />
Lubis said goodbye to her family<br />
and left the farm, her home <strong>for</strong><br />
only nine months, and Batangas,<br />
where she has lived <strong>for</strong> all her<br />
30 years. “Doon ako tinubuan<br />
ng sungay (That’s where I grew<br />
horns),” Magsino-Lubis says of<br />
her province. “But I did not<br />
have a choice (other than to<br />
leave).” In her backpack, she<br />
tucked five tops, three pairs of<br />
jeans, six pairs of underwear,<br />
four pairs of socks, documents,<br />
photographs, notepads, pens,<br />
and about P22,000 in cash. In<br />
her bones ran a cold, steady<br />
stream of fear.<br />
Not too long ago, Magsino-Lubis<br />
had felt relatively safe, since,<br />
she says, her employer was not<br />
some small, obscure community<br />
paper, but the country’s biggest<br />
daily. “Ang yabang ko noon (I<br />
was so confident then),” she says.<br />
Now she realizes she is—and has<br />
always been—as vulnerable as<br />
all the other journalists who had<br />
been hunted down and killed in<br />
some remote town.<br />
At least one international<br />
media watchdog has described<br />
the <strong>Philippine</strong>s as “the most<br />
murderous of all” when it comes<br />
to media deaths, beating even<br />
those countries where drug lords<br />
reign or civil strife rages. Since<br />
1986, 54 Filipino journalists have<br />
been killed in the line of duty.<br />
Most of them were broadcasters<br />
working outside Metro Manila,<br />
20 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
J O U R N A L I S T A T R I S K<br />
and at the time of their deaths<br />
reporting or commenting on irregularities<br />
in their local governments.<br />
Of these cases, only two<br />
have resulted in the convictions<br />
of the assassins, according to<br />
the <strong>Center</strong> <strong>for</strong> Media Freedom<br />
and Responsibility (CMFR). No<br />
mastermind has ever been found<br />
and prosecuted.<br />
It is probably no com<strong>for</strong>t to<br />
Magsino-Lubis that elsewhere in<br />
the world, journalists who are<br />
killed often do not die while<br />
<strong>cover</strong>ing armed conflicts or some<br />
similar assignment. Instead, says<br />
the Committee to Project Journalists<br />
(CPJ), which studied more<br />
than five years of journalists’<br />
death records from 2000, a huge<br />
majority are murdered in retaliation<br />
<strong>for</strong> their work.<br />
In Batangas itself, journalist<br />
Arnel Manalo was killed just last<br />
year, on August 5, when two<br />
men on a motorcycle ambushed<br />
him while he was on his way<br />
home on his jeep. He was shot<br />
twice, the bullets hitting the left<br />
side of the face and his neck.<br />
Manalo was a correspondent<br />
<strong>for</strong> the radio station DZRH and<br />
wrote a column <strong>for</strong> the local<br />
newspapers Dyaryo Veritas and<br />
Southern Tagalog. He did not<br />
mince words in his columns, at<br />
one point calling the governor<br />
“berdugo ng kapitolyo (tyrant<br />
of the capitol)” a month be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
he was killed, and also saying<br />
there was an “atmosphere of<br />
fear” among capitol employees<br />
in a follow-up piece.<br />
But Manalo was a member<br />
of the As-is barangay council as<br />
well, which was why the CMFR,<br />
in its report about his death, did<br />
not rule out <strong>political</strong> rivals as<br />
among the masterminds <strong>for</strong> his<br />
killing. Manalo’s family filed a<br />
case against someone said to be<br />
the triggerman; the case is still<br />
at the prosecutor’s office. The<br />
primary witness was another<br />
journalist, who testified that he<br />
heard the alleged triggerman<br />
planning the killing with the<br />
barangay captain, about whom<br />
Manalo had also written in the<br />
last two weeks of July 2004. The<br />
family did not file a case against<br />
the barangay captain.<br />
MURDERED<br />
OMBUDSMAN<br />
Magsino-Lubis, however, only<br />
has to think of Guillermo Gamo<br />
to feel particularly vulnerable.<br />
They had agreed to have a meeting<br />
on May 31. Gamo, who was<br />
the Batangas provincial ombudsman,<br />
had promised to talk to her<br />
and give her documents related<br />
to what he said were anomalous<br />
deals involving provincial officials.<br />
But the day be<strong>for</strong>e they<br />
were supposed to meet, Gamo<br />
was killed on his way to work.<br />
According to the police, two gunmen<br />
ambushed his vehicle as it<br />
took a turn at a junction in barangay<br />
Balagtas in the capital. The<br />
gunmen fired at least 16 shots,<br />
then entered the ombudsman’s<br />
vehicle and took his briefcase<br />
be<strong>for</strong>e speeding off on a motorcycle.<br />
“That briefcase was <strong>for</strong><br />
me,” says Magsino-Lubis.<br />
In the days immediately following<br />
Gamo’s death, her sources<br />
among the capitol’s employees<br />
avoided her phone calls and<br />
stopped answering her text messages.<br />
She tried to visit Gamo’s<br />
office, but she could not even<br />
get close as employees, from a<br />
distance, shooed her away. “They<br />
were so scared,” Magsino-Lubis<br />
says, adding that she could hardly<br />
blame them. She herself does not<br />
pretend she isn’t afraid. “Tell me,”<br />
she says, “how you’d feel if you<br />
know you’re next.”<br />
Just a few months be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
Gamo’s death, Magsino-Lubis<br />
had been in pure wedded bliss.<br />
She and her husband, a businessman,<br />
were married only in<br />
October last year. She had taken<br />
a couple of months off be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
going back to work and dis<strong>cover</strong>ed<br />
she had a flair <strong>for</strong> farming.<br />
She even began experimenting<br />
with organic methods, and took<br />
pride in the variety of herbs and<br />
flowers she was able to grow.<br />
But she remained <strong>for</strong>emost a<br />
journalist, and she was soon<br />
back dispatching stories about<br />
agriculture, the environment,<br />
crime, and other subjects.<br />
Her plan was, to her mind,<br />
very simple: farm in the mornings,<br />
do journalism in the afternoons,<br />
and come home in the<br />
evenings, to her husband and<br />
Mochtar, the boy they planned<br />
on having as soon as possible,<br />
a son they would name after the<br />
famous Indonesian journalist. “It<br />
was all going to be good and<br />
easy,” Magsino-Lubis says of the<br />
life she and her husband were<br />
preparing <strong>for</strong>. But those plans<br />
have had to be put on hold.<br />
SLAPPED WITH A<br />
LAWSUIT<br />
On July 5, Governor Sanchez<br />
filed an oral defamation case<br />
against Magsino-Lubis, a case the<br />
prosecutor elevated promptly<br />
to the Batangas Regional Trial<br />
Court. Sanchez accused her of<br />
being disrespectful to him during<br />
an interview at the capitol<br />
the day be<strong>for</strong>e. The mayors’<br />
league also adopted a resolution<br />
declaring her persona non grata<br />
<strong>for</strong> the same reasons cited in the<br />
governor’s claim.<br />
Magsino-Lubis, however,<br />
says it was in fact the governor<br />
who had verbally abused her<br />
while she was trying to ask him<br />
about a computerization project<br />
the capitol would be undertaking.<br />
A few minutes into the interview,<br />
she says, she had already<br />
realized that Sanchez was very<br />
agitated. She was still taking<br />
notes when the cuss words began<br />
to rain on her head. “I lost<br />
count how many times he cursed<br />
me,” she says.<br />
Sanchez filed the oral defamation<br />
case on the same day her<br />
report about the computerization<br />
project came out in the Inquirer.<br />
The article, which Magsino-Lubis<br />
co-wrote with another reporter,<br />
discussed the P350-million<br />
project that will fully computerize<br />
Batangas’s real-property taxation<br />
system. The report raised questions<br />
about the conduct of the<br />
bidding process, and offered<br />
the theory—based on corporate<br />
and other documents—that the<br />
governor himself was the owner<br />
of the company that clinched<br />
Controversial governor. Armand<br />
Sanchez (second from left) has been<br />
linked to jueteng by his <strong>political</strong><br />
opponents and by the Batangas clergy.<br />
the contract. Sanchez has since<br />
denied this.<br />
In hindsight, Magsino-Lubis<br />
notes that her fateful interview<br />
with the governor took place<br />
while Senate witnesses were<br />
pointing to Sanchez as among<br />
those who should be summoned<br />
to the hearings to explain their<br />
supposed involvement in jueteng<br />
operations. Magsino-Lubis herself<br />
had repeatedly reported on<br />
the governor’s alleged jueteng<br />
connection, but public interest<br />
in the issue and the personalities<br />
involved was particularly high<br />
while the congressional inquiry<br />
was going on. It was not surprising<br />
then, she says, that Sanchez<br />
had become increasingly edgy<br />
about reports on him and his<br />
work at the capitol.<br />
Still, Magsino-Lubis did not<br />
expect that the governor would<br />
file a case against her, or that<br />
the case would be brought immediately<br />
to court without any<br />
preliminary investigation. She<br />
was not even given a chance to<br />
file a counter-affidavit. Two days<br />
later, she received that dire call<br />
from one of her sources, who<br />
also in<strong>for</strong>med her that she was<br />
to be finished off when she appeared<br />
be<strong>for</strong>e the court to post<br />
bail. “The case was meant to<br />
make me surface at a particular<br />
time and place so they could kill<br />
me,” says Magsino-Lubis.<br />
Her editors at the Inquirer<br />
have since provided her with<br />
legal assistance, and lawyers<br />
have filed <strong>for</strong> her a motion to<br />
dismiss Sanchez’s suit.<br />
PARANOIA AND<br />
DISTRUST<br />
As far as she can tell, the threat to<br />
her life is not the subject of any<br />
official police investigation. The<br />
governor himself, in a written reply<br />
to PCIJ’s queries, implies there is<br />
no reason <strong>for</strong> her to be on the run,<br />
since there is no one after her. A<br />
few of her colleagues in Batangas<br />
and Manila are also unsympathetic,<br />
although that seems more because<br />
Magsino-Lubis tends to come off as<br />
blowhard and rather self-righteous<br />
to some people. But Magsino-Lubis<br />
says that a day after she fled<br />
Batangas, she received another<br />
call from another source, who told<br />
her exactly what the first caller had<br />
said. She recalls telling her second<br />
in<strong>for</strong>mant, “If I had waited <strong>for</strong> your<br />
call, I’d be dead by now.”<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
21
She says she had no time to<br />
go to the local police to report<br />
the threat and have it put on the<br />
blotter. Besides, she says, she<br />
did not trust the Batangas police<br />
at the time. She has, however,<br />
managed to submit a letter about<br />
her situation to Task Force Gamo,<br />
which was <strong>for</strong>med to investigate<br />
the ombudsman’s death, as well<br />
as to <strong>Philippine</strong> National Police<br />
Director General Arturo Lomibao.<br />
She has been told by Task Force<br />
Gamo, however, that it lacks<br />
funds to include her case in its<br />
investigation.<br />
Months later, Magsino-Lubis<br />
has yet to get used to life on the<br />
run. Home <strong>for</strong> a week could be a<br />
posh condominium unit owned<br />
by a godparent. For the next, a<br />
studio leased by a friend, and<br />
the next, a musty room in a<br />
youth hostel. She had practically<br />
mapped out the rest of her life<br />
with her husband, and now she<br />
cannot make plans beyond a<br />
few days. She says the paranoia<br />
she is <strong>for</strong>ced to have is torture,<br />
although the greatest casualty so<br />
far has been her ability to trust<br />
people. There was one time she<br />
was enjoying a garden show<br />
with one of her “foster mothers”<br />
when a woman recognized her<br />
and asked, “‘Di ba ikaw si Mei<br />
Magsino, taga-Inquirer (Aren’t<br />
you Mei Magsino, from the Inquirer)?”<br />
The very same day she<br />
left to find another temporary<br />
sanctuary.<br />
Another time she had engaged<br />
the security guard of the<br />
condominium where she was<br />
staying in a friendly chat. The<br />
guard mentioned a “governor”<br />
who was frequenting the building<br />
to visit a friend. Magsino-Lubis<br />
pressed the guard <strong>for</strong> more<br />
details, and was told it was a<br />
“Governor Sanchez.” Magsino-<br />
Lubis ran all the way to the unit<br />
she was occupying, grabbed<br />
her things, and was soon on<br />
the street looking <strong>for</strong> another<br />
place to stay.<br />
But even as she runs, she<br />
has not stopped doing her job.<br />
She has been able to file a few<br />
stories since leaving Batangas,<br />
doing research, speaking to<br />
sources by phone or meeting<br />
up with them. Once she has all<br />
her materials ready, she finds an<br />
Who is Armando Sanchez?<br />
B<br />
ATANGAS GOVERNOR<br />
Armando Sanchez<br />
says journalist Mei<br />
Magsino-Lubis is<br />
“lying through her<br />
teeth when she says she is in<br />
hiding.” He also says “the only<br />
time there were PNP personnel<br />
looking <strong>for</strong> her” was when she<br />
was still the subject of an arrest<br />
operation <strong>cover</strong>ed by “a valid arrest<br />
warrant” regarding the oral<br />
defamation case he had filed<br />
against the Inquirer correspondent.<br />
After she posted bail, the<br />
governor says in a written reply<br />
to questions sent to him by the<br />
PCIJ, “the operation to arrest<br />
her was stopped.”<br />
“We completely deny the<br />
canard that two prisoners from<br />
the Batangas Provincial Jail were<br />
deliberately let loose to kill Mei<br />
Magsino-Lubis,” he adds. “(We)<br />
challenge any and everyone<br />
to conduct unannounced head<br />
counts of the prisoners in the<br />
Provincial Jail.”<br />
Such a head count would<br />
have meant a lot during the<br />
time of Magsino-Lubis’s own<br />
“escape.” But now it would be<br />
futile, if citizens’ crime watchgroups<br />
are to be believed. Ellen<br />
Gran of the Crusade Against<br />
Violence, <strong>for</strong> instance, says prisoners<br />
who are let out of jail to<br />
commit crimes at the instigation<br />
of powerful people are usually<br />
let in again after the deed is<br />
done or the plot is un<strong>cover</strong>ed.<br />
This gives the criminals the<br />
perfect alibi because it appears<br />
they had been in prison all the<br />
time.<br />
Governor Sanchez of course<br />
would probably rather that<br />
people count not the prisoners<br />
in the provincial jail, but his<br />
accomplishments as a public<br />
official, especially as mayor of<br />
Sto. Tomas town. This includes<br />
a three-story town hall that was<br />
built, according to official statements,<br />
with P22 million of his<br />
own personal<br />
funds. His stint<br />
as mayor also<br />
produced a<br />
28-bed hospital<br />
and garnered the<br />
municipality the<br />
top prize in a nationwide<br />
search<br />
<strong>for</strong> the cleanest<br />
and greenest<br />
town in 2002. It<br />
also led to the<br />
computerization<br />
of Sto. Tomas’s<br />
real property tax<br />
collection system, which, says<br />
Sanchez, resulted in a 300-<br />
percent increase in collection<br />
and enabled the municipality to<br />
make the huge leap from being<br />
fifth-class to first-class. He had<br />
wanted this computerization program<br />
to be replicated throughout<br />
the whole of Batangas, but his<br />
attempt to do so has somehow<br />
dragged him into controversy.<br />
Then again, there are other<br />
controversies that Sanchez has<br />
found himself in, <strong>for</strong>emost of<br />
which involves the nagging allegation<br />
that he is a jueteng lord.<br />
Journalists from the region have<br />
long referred to the alleged links<br />
of Sanchez to the illegal game.<br />
When he won the gubernatorial<br />
seat last year, among the<br />
first questions the local media<br />
there asked was on Sanchez’s<br />
supposed jueteng connections.<br />
He and his supporters<br />
have repeatedly denied this. In<br />
the local paper<br />
Batangan, one of<br />
his key campaign<br />
personnel and<br />
present provincial<br />
administrator,<br />
Ronnie Geron,<br />
was quoted as<br />
saying, “Arman is<br />
not into jueteng.”<br />
Geron, however,<br />
said that his boss<br />
was a partner in<br />
an “online sports<br />
betting” venture,<br />
although he also<br />
said Sanchez would soon divest<br />
himself of his interests in that<br />
business.<br />
In his reply to the PCIJ’s queries,<br />
Sanchez himself says, “We<br />
reiterate that we do not know<br />
anything about jueteng.” But<br />
he also says, “We have been<br />
very consistent in our stand <strong>for</strong><br />
its legalization, from the time<br />
I became mayor, during the<br />
two terms that I served in Sto.<br />
Tomas and up to the time I was<br />
elected Governor. Now that it<br />
has stopped, we are hoping that<br />
the issue would be laid to rest.”<br />
For sure, Sanchez, who,<br />
based on his own assets statement,<br />
is worth at least P90 million,<br />
does not comport himself<br />
like a lord—not even a jueteng<br />
lord. This is even though he was,<br />
by many accounts, already rich<br />
by the time he entered politics<br />
and became mayor of Sto.<br />
Tomas in 1998. Educated as a<br />
mechanical engineer, Sanchez<br />
worked in Saudi Arabia in the<br />
1980s be<strong>for</strong>e coming back and<br />
reportedly starting several businesses,<br />
among them construction<br />
firms, a travel agency, and<br />
a security agency. But in the<br />
conjugal 2004 statement of assets<br />
and liabilities he filed with<br />
his wife Edna, at present the<br />
Sto. Tomas mayor, no business<br />
interests appear.<br />
Although wealthy, the portly<br />
governor prefers com<strong>for</strong>t to<br />
class. Those who know him well<br />
say that even while at work at<br />
the capitol, he likes to wear a<br />
kamiseta (sleeveless undershirt),<br />
a pair of loose shorts,<br />
and flipflops. Like many of his<br />
provincemates, he also tends to<br />
talk loudly, as if always gearing<br />
<strong>for</strong> a fight.<br />
Which is just as well. The<br />
national dailies say that in fact<br />
Sanchez is in a “brawl” with<br />
his own vice governor, who will<br />
not let go of the jueteng issue,<br />
aside from other things. In the<br />
prefatory statement in the graft<br />
case he filed be<strong>for</strong>e the Ombudsman<br />
in early September,<br />
Vice Governor Richard ‘Ricky’<br />
22 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
J O U R N A L I S T A T R I S K<br />
Internet café where she writes<br />
her pieces and then submits<br />
them by email. She says she has<br />
not been back in Batangas since<br />
she left the province, contrary to<br />
claims by the governor that she<br />
has even been seen windowshopping<br />
there.<br />
Magsino-Lubis says she is<br />
tired, of course. She wants to<br />
be able to use her own name<br />
again whenever she checks into<br />
an inn, a hotel, a hostel. She<br />
longs to be able to walk the<br />
streets without having to wear a<br />
baseball cap. When she sits in a<br />
café, she wants to enjoy her cup<br />
of barako without having to keep<br />
looking at the door every time<br />
someone comes in.<br />
For now, however, it has to<br />
be this way if she wants to be<br />
able to go back alive to Batangas<br />
and her husband. After all, the<br />
subject of her investigations is no<br />
longer the college dean who told<br />
her—the editor-in-chief of the<br />
school paper—that she would<br />
not be allowed to graduate unless<br />
she donated a karaoke to the<br />
dean’s office. This time around,<br />
whether or not she is right about<br />
who wants her dead, there is<br />
no doubt that she is up against<br />
a far more powerful figure. But<br />
Magsino-Lubis says, “Politicians<br />
can only stay so long in office.<br />
I’ll be a journalist <strong>for</strong>ever.”<br />
A JUETENG PAST<br />
It’s actually rather ironic that<br />
she came to writing exposés<br />
on jueteng, since her maternal<br />
grandfather was one of the game’s<br />
operators. She has vivid childhood<br />
memories of policemen knocking<br />
on their door at two in the<br />
morning to “collect.” She recalls,<br />
“My lolo would give P5,000. The<br />
police would leave with a goat in<br />
tow as well.”<br />
Her mother was an avid<br />
jueteng player, too, placing<br />
bets every morning. But that<br />
was then. Now Magsino-Lubis’s<br />
mother no longer plays the<br />
game, concentrating instead on<br />
running the family restaurant<br />
and pig farm. Magsino-Lubis<br />
says her parents and four siblings<br />
are among her sources of<br />
courage. She says, “My family<br />
has three words <strong>for</strong> me: ‘Kaya<br />
mo ‘yan (You can do it)’.”<br />
She is also reassured that her<br />
case is being watched closely<br />
by local organizations such as<br />
the CMFR and the <strong>Philippine</strong><br />
Press Institute, as well as international<br />
groups like the CPJ<br />
and the International Freedom<br />
of Expression Exchange. She<br />
is hoping, she says, that letting<br />
more people know about the<br />
threats against her will lessen the<br />
chances of her being hurt.<br />
In addition, Magsino-Lubis is<br />
able to count on the support of the<br />
Church. Lipa Archbishop Ramon<br />
Arguelles had offered her refuge<br />
months ago, suggesting she go to<br />
the Canossa convent in Lipa. But<br />
Magsino-Lubis, while grateful <strong>for</strong><br />
the gesture, did not want to be<br />
cloistered. “I wouldn’t be able to<br />
work there,” she says. The mere<br />
thought of being unable to practice<br />
her profession is a nightmare<br />
<strong>for</strong> her, since she says she has tons<br />
and tons to write about.<br />
And write she will, although<br />
she wishes that soon she will<br />
be able to do so back home in<br />
Batangas, in her farm, with her<br />
husband and the birds that greet<br />
them every morning.<br />
i<br />
Recto even says that Sanchez is<br />
“widely known” to be a jueteng<br />
lord not just in Batangas, “but<br />
nationwide.” According to Recto,<br />
Sto. Tomas has been known<br />
as the “center of (Sanchez’s)<br />
jueteng operations <strong>for</strong> the last<br />
20 years.”<br />
Earlier this year, Sanchez’s<br />
name had also surfaced in lists<br />
of government officials with alleged<br />
jueteng links. Drawn up by<br />
the Department of Justice and<br />
the People’s Crusade Against<br />
Jueteng, these lists were partly<br />
why Sanchez was summoned<br />
last June to the Senate hearings<br />
on jueteng. But Sanchez told<br />
the Senate that he would be in<br />
Japan on a business trip at the<br />
time and could not make it. He<br />
was not summoned again.<br />
Recto’s case against<br />
Sanchez, however, is not really<br />
about jueteng. Rather, it alleges<br />
that the governor “and his 15<br />
co-conspirators” are carrying out<br />
a P350-million real property tax<br />
computerization project under<br />
anomalous circumstances, rigging<br />
the bid and awarding the<br />
deal to a “dummy” corporation,<br />
the Automated Data Processing<br />
Technologies Inc. (ADPT),<br />
purportedly owned by Sanchez<br />
himself.<br />
The governor dismisses<br />
Recto’s findings of irregularities,<br />
saying they are “at best a<br />
flawed opinion.” Sanchez says<br />
all of capitol’s projects, including<br />
the computerization, have<br />
gone through all the procedures<br />
laid out in the law. He also says,<br />
“(The) final step mandated by<br />
the New Procurement Law is the<br />
Trouble in the capitol. Gov.<br />
Sanchez (front row, third from left)<br />
presides over the launching of his<br />
<strong>political</strong> coalition just outside the<br />
Batangas provincial capitol.<br />
review process now being done<br />
by the (Commission on Audit).”<br />
In earlier denials of wrongdoing<br />
published in local newspapers,<br />
capitol officials defending<br />
the contract said that all documents<br />
pertaining to the contract<br />
were immediately turned over to<br />
COA after the first payment was<br />
made. Sanchez now says, “We<br />
are asking everybody to simmer<br />
down a little bit and just wait <strong>for</strong><br />
(COA’s) findings.”<br />
But Recto retorts that the<br />
documents given to COA had<br />
already been sanitized. “I think<br />
they pulled out the papers after<br />
Mei’s story and redid the whole<br />
thing,” Recto says, referring to<br />
Magsino-Lubis’s Inquirer report<br />
that questioned how ADPT could<br />
have won the contract when the<br />
company had not even been<br />
born yet at the time that the payment<br />
<strong>for</strong> it was obligated.<br />
Asked by Newsbreak in September<br />
about public perception<br />
that he was merely running after<br />
the governor’s seat, Recto told<br />
the magazine, “I’ve been through<br />
that.” He stressed, “If my allegations<br />
happen to be true,<br />
whatever my motivations are,<br />
please <strong>for</strong>give me.” Later that<br />
month, when the suspension order<br />
<strong>for</strong> the governor that he was<br />
expecting did not come, Recto<br />
called <strong>for</strong> a press conference in<br />
Manila and repeated the claims<br />
he makes in his graft case. Lipa<br />
Archbishop Ramon Arguelles sat<br />
beside the vice governor and<br />
was later described by newspapers<br />
as having rebuked Sanchez<br />
<strong>for</strong> “graft and corruption, the<br />
atmosphere of fear, and the<br />
spread of vice” in the province.<br />
Sanchez has since told<br />
PCIJ that “if given a chance to<br />
meet and converse with (the<br />
Archbishop), I am certain that<br />
he would completely change his<br />
preconceived apprehensions<br />
about me.”<br />
Sanchez does have his own<br />
set of admirers, among them<br />
Batangan’s Sonny Atienza, who in<br />
a 2004 column praised the new<br />
governor <strong>for</strong> his “definite goals<br />
and objectives,” including a plan<br />
to rid the province of drug abuse.<br />
Atienza also cited Sanchez’s successful<br />
move to rid the bureaucracy<br />
of “nonper<strong>for</strong>ming assets”<br />
and have capitol personnel<br />
practice strict observance of office<br />
hours. And, wrote Atienza, in<br />
just a matter of one or two days,<br />
Sanchez was even able to clear<br />
the roads leading to the capitol of<br />
parked jeepneys that had robbed<br />
other motorists and pedestrians<br />
of needed space.<br />
The governor, however,<br />
seems to have had a harder<br />
time fending off all sorts of<br />
allegations, such as cheating in<br />
the 2004 elections. In response<br />
to a protest lodged by losing<br />
candidate Rosario Apacible,<br />
who placed second in a field of<br />
seven, the Commission on Elections<br />
(Comelec) began a recount<br />
of the gubernatorial votes from<br />
some 2,000 precincts across<br />
the province. Apacible alleges<br />
that Sanchez’s winning margin<br />
of some 60,000 votes was<br />
merely the result of fraud, including<br />
the use of dagdag-bawas<br />
(vote-padding and –shaving).<br />
As of this writing, the Comelec<br />
has completed a recount of<br />
just some 600 precincts. The<br />
recount was suspended at the<br />
end of September after Comelec<br />
personnel dis<strong>cover</strong>ed around<br />
90 empty ballot boxes from the<br />
municipality of Padre Garcia.<br />
– Vinia Datinguinoo<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
23
BATTLE OF THE<br />
BILLBOARDS<br />
CHARLENE DY<br />
THEY’RE BIG and<br />
bold, but Metro<br />
Manila’s billboards<br />
aren’t exactly beautiful,<br />
at least not to<br />
everyone. These<br />
days one billboard<br />
has caught the city’s attention,<br />
and few have had nice words <strong>for</strong><br />
it just yet. One irate motorist even<br />
called up a radio station to ask,<br />
“Can I do anything about the fact<br />
that when you’re going south on<br />
Edsa on the Guadalupe Bridge,<br />
there’s a big moving screen, and<br />
it’s glaring, even distracting, and<br />
might cause traffic accidents?”<br />
The radio host’s reply: “Well, I<br />
think it’s owned by the city of<br />
Makati.”<br />
It turns out the electronic<br />
billboard in question is only a<br />
“joint venture” between the city<br />
of Makati and Dream Advertising,<br />
which owns it. Dream<br />
Advertising, with the help of<br />
Korean partners, brought LED<br />
(light emitting diode) technology<br />
recently to Manila. Since the<br />
billboard was put up this year, it<br />
has attracted controversy along<br />
with ad placements. Motorists<br />
have griped about its brightness,<br />
billboard suppliers complain<br />
that it blocks the advertisements<br />
behind it, environmentalists dislike<br />
that its foundation was built<br />
on a <strong>for</strong>mer public park. It also<br />
turns out that it went up after<br />
Makati’s local government had<br />
already issued a memorandum<br />
prohibiting any billboard permits<br />
to be granted until a new set of<br />
ordinances—the Makati City Billboard<br />
Masterplan—takes effect.<br />
Makati City Building Inspector<br />
Ruel Almazan says the plans <strong>for</strong><br />
the billboard had been submitted<br />
be<strong>for</strong>e the memorandum was issued,<br />
which was why it was able<br />
to clinch a permit. He also says<br />
the billboard had been a donation<br />
to the city. Engineer Annabelle<br />
Maniego, meanwhile, says that<br />
there had been a special resolution<br />
granted <strong>for</strong> the LED, adding<br />
that the display is “supposed to be<br />
<strong>for</strong> Makati City programs.”<br />
On the same day that she<br />
says this, however, among the<br />
billboard’s 10- or 15- second<br />
spots is a commercial of a golden<br />
chicken patty plopping onto<br />
a lettuce-topped bun. It’s an ad<br />
<strong>for</strong> KFC, which doesn’t seem to<br />
have anything to do with Makati<br />
City programs. To Dream executives,<br />
there is no question that<br />
the billboard is commercial, but<br />
its association with Makati City<br />
has caused a great deal of confusion,<br />
both <strong>for</strong> commuters and, it<br />
seems, <strong>for</strong> city officials.<br />
In any case, the questions surrounding<br />
the electronic billboard<br />
make it an ideal poster child—or<br />
problem child—<strong>for</strong> the ongoing<br />
billboard debate, which is admittedly<br />
getting to be more one-sided<br />
as each day passes: just about everyone<br />
has something bad to say<br />
about them. Just about everyone,<br />
however, also believes there’s<br />
profit to be made (and being<br />
made) in those giant signs.<br />
Not that there’s anything bad<br />
about commerce per se. People<br />
like environmentalist Odette<br />
Alcantara, however, say that<br />
the resulting mushrooming of<br />
billboards is an ethical issue, in<br />
part because they mar the natural<br />
city skyline. Alcantara is the<br />
convener of the Anti-Billboard<br />
Coalition or ABC, a group of<br />
about 30 motorists, journalists,<br />
lawyers, greenies, and other<br />
concerned citizens. “I want to<br />
make it clear,” she announces.<br />
“I’m not against billboards. I’m<br />
against billboards in the wrong<br />
place. I’m anti-space abuse.” For<br />
Alcantara, the billboard boom<br />
infringes on public space: the<br />
open air, the landscape, things<br />
she feels belong to everyone,<br />
not just outdoor-media suppliers<br />
and advertising agencies.<br />
She also says, “They are traffic<br />
hazards. They supplant the road<br />
signs!” There are also issues<br />
regarding aesthetics, offensive<br />
content, and structural safety.<br />
These can be difficult to<br />
quantify. No studies have been<br />
conducted that show whether<br />
traffic accidents are caused by<br />
billboards, <strong>for</strong> instance, and offensiveness<br />
is subjective. While<br />
one viewer may see a billboard of<br />
a bare-chested hunk in low-riding<br />
denims as lascivious, another<br />
might consider it the highlight of<br />
her—or his—daily commute.<br />
In 2003, the Outdoor Advertising<br />
Association of the <strong>Philippine</strong>s<br />
(OAAP) also commissioned a<br />
study that showed only three<br />
percent of media viewers in Metro<br />
Manila had totally “negative” responses<br />
to billboards. Alcantara,<br />
however, says numbers are irrelevant.<br />
“You don’t win (the debate)<br />
with statistics,” she says. “I want it<br />
discussed on a moral high ground.<br />
This is essentially a moral issue,<br />
an abuse of power.”<br />
MONEY MACHINES<br />
Again, <strong>for</strong> the cynical, all these<br />
can really be boiled down to that<br />
simple fact of life: money. Or as<br />
media consultant Lloyd Tronco<br />
puts it, the current billboard explosion<br />
has roots in changes in market<br />
demographics, improved technology,<br />
and competitive prices.<br />
Tronco points out that billboards<br />
can connect easily with<br />
target markets because “more<br />
people are mobile nowadays,”<br />
referring to the increasing<br />
number of commuters and<br />
more time spent outside of the<br />
house. There has also been the<br />
advent of digital printing, which<br />
has allowed billboards to be<br />
printed cheaply and quickly<br />
on tarpaulin, a resilient, element-friendly<br />
material. Lately,<br />
billboards have been getting<br />
pocket-friendly are as well. According<br />
to Carlo Llave, OAAP<br />
chairman and president of media<br />
supplier Fourth Dimension, they<br />
fetched P200 per square-foot<br />
in 1989, when they were first<br />
24 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
T H E M E T R O P O L I S<br />
introduced in the country. The<br />
peso was still something like 26<br />
to the U.S. dollar then. Today,<br />
tarpaulin billboards cost only<br />
P14 per square foot.<br />
In contrast, “rates are skyrocketing”<br />
<strong>for</strong> other media<br />
(radio, TV, print) advertising,<br />
says Joel Callao, president of<br />
outdoor-media supplier MediaPool.<br />
For instance, a 3,000-<br />
square-foot billboard on a major<br />
route like Edsa would cost about<br />
P200,000 per month. A full-color,<br />
full-page ad in a major daily<br />
newspaper would cost approximately<br />
P250,000 on a weekday,<br />
and P300,000 on weekends. A<br />
30-second primetime slot on a<br />
major local channel, meanwhile,<br />
would run about P180,000.<br />
Advertisers aren’t the only<br />
ones who profit from billboards’<br />
af<strong>for</strong>dable rates. Obviously so<br />
do media suppliers, who are<br />
the actual billboard builders and<br />
maintainers; numerous landowners<br />
also benefit from renting<br />
out their property.<br />
So money is really being made,<br />
lots of it in fact, although trying<br />
to keep track of just how much<br />
the outdoor-advertising industry<br />
is raking in can be thorny, since<br />
there is no system <strong>for</strong> measuring<br />
the budgets and revenues of those<br />
connected with it. But Callao<br />
suggests that if one assumes that<br />
the leading firms, such as United<br />
Neon, Carranz, and his own MediaPool,<br />
gross some P5 million<br />
each per month, the collective<br />
yearly revenues <strong>for</strong> the industry’s<br />
top ten earners could reach P600<br />
million a year. There are about 60<br />
other smaller billboard suppliers<br />
within the OAAP, many of whom<br />
earn approximately P2 million a<br />
month, and countless other media<br />
suppliers that aren’t affiliated<br />
with the association. Add all the<br />
numbers, and the total take of the<br />
industry could be more than P2<br />
billion a year.<br />
WIN-WIN IN MAKATI?<br />
If only money were everything.<br />
In the case of the electronic billboard,<br />
where a single ad account<br />
can mean revenues of as much as<br />
P445,000 a month, the company<br />
that constructed and maintains it<br />
says it has an everybody-wins arrangement<br />
with the city government.<br />
“It’s an in<strong>for</strong>mation drive<br />
with the city of Makati,” says<br />
Dream Advertising managing<br />
director Tim Orbos. “We provide<br />
the infrastructure, operation,<br />
and expenses. We get the right<br />
to advertise and in return, we<br />
provide free advertisement <strong>for</strong><br />
them.” That includes having the<br />
city’s website address printed<br />
underneath the billboard.<br />
Orbos says Makati’s in<strong>for</strong>mation<br />
materials “are still raw,” but<br />
that eventually, 30 percent of<br />
the billboard’s content will be<br />
set aside <strong>for</strong> the city’s announcements.<br />
The rest would be purely<br />
commercial. Already, Dream has<br />
snagged an exclusive contract<br />
with broadcast big boy GMA-7,<br />
which is why the electronic billboard<br />
has lately been flashing ads<br />
<strong>for</strong> the network’s Koreanovela<br />
“Sassy Girl,” along with those <strong>for</strong><br />
other shows. Orbos also hastens<br />
to add that the commercial spots<br />
may include “socially relevant<br />
messages” from the likes of the<br />
United Nations, which will enjoy<br />
discounted rates.<br />
The electronic billboard operates<br />
from six a.m. to midnight.<br />
Its viewing screen measures<br />
11.5 x 7 meters or 866.5 sq. ft,<br />
although its total size is about<br />
12.5 x 8.5 meters or 1,143.5 sq.<br />
ft. That makes it the largest fullcolor<br />
LED billboard in the <strong>Philippine</strong>s,<br />
although there have been<br />
bigger traditional billboards.<br />
Recently its brightness has been<br />
toned down in response to motorists’<br />
complaints. But neither<br />
Dream Advertising nor Makati<br />
City looks willing to reduce<br />
its size or relocate it, as other<br />
billboard suppliers are hoping<br />
would happen, since its strategic<br />
placement, has obscured the<br />
billboards behind it. That prime<br />
location, however, allow it to be<br />
viewed by “4.5 million eyeballs”<br />
a day, and that excludes the eyeballs<br />
of MRT commuters.<br />
QUESTIONS ABOUT<br />
SAFETY<br />
At least no one is hyperventilating<br />
yet about it being possibly<br />
unsafe, structurally speaking. In<br />
pre-tarpaulin days, when billboards<br />
were made out of painted<br />
galvanized sheets pieced together<br />
on wooden and metal frames,<br />
people harped about the tendency<br />
of such signs to topple over<br />
during an earthquake, or <strong>for</strong> a<br />
particularly nasty typhoon to tear<br />
the sheets off their frames and<br />
have them flying about, ready to<br />
scalp some hapless passerby.<br />
The tarpaulin billboard was<br />
supposed to be relatively free<br />
of similar worries. But then in<br />
mid-September, the edge of one<br />
such sign, located somewhere<br />
between the MRT Cubao and<br />
Kamuning stations, ripped and<br />
went unfixed by the media supplier<br />
Big Board, in violation of<br />
building code regulations. Three<br />
days after, strong winds tore the<br />
tarpaulin completely free from<br />
its frame and then carried it far<br />
enough to get snagged on the<br />
power cable of an oncoming<br />
train. As it dragged on the line,<br />
it caught fire, disrupting MRT<br />
operations <strong>for</strong> eight hours, or<br />
the equivalent of P4 million in<br />
lost revenues. Fortunately, no<br />
one was hurt, but there were a<br />
lot of frayed nerves among MRT<br />
officials and commuters alike.<br />
For legislators, structural safety<br />
is the most crucial billboard<br />
issue. Most billboard legislation<br />
is based on the National Building<br />
Code, whose guidelines are<br />
vague at best. In drafting Bill 1714<br />
or the Billboard Blight Act, Senator<br />
Miriam Defensor-Santiago<br />
tried to address this shortcoming<br />
as well as the fact that, at present,<br />
local governments rely too heavily<br />
on the outdoor-advertising<br />
industry to self-regulate.<br />
Defensor-Santiago’s bill offers<br />
specifications on distance from<br />
roadways, intersections, and traffic<br />
lights, number of billboards<br />
allowed within a given area,<br />
and restrictions on size (such<br />
as, “No billboard shall exceed<br />
300 square feet in total surface<br />
display area”), with the intent of<br />
maintaining safety. The bill also<br />
seeks to be applied to all streets,<br />
not just national roads, meaning<br />
it would supersede the authority<br />
of both the Department of Public<br />
Works and Highways (DPWH)<br />
and local governments. “What<br />
we’re doing here,” says Camille<br />
Sevilla, legislative staff officer<br />
<strong>for</strong> Defensor-Santiago, “is giving<br />
national standard that will make<br />
it mandatory <strong>for</strong> local public<br />
officials to follow. We’re setting<br />
standards <strong>for</strong> safety, structure.”<br />
Media consultant Tronco<br />
says some regulations the senator<br />
is asking <strong>for</strong> are “excessive”<br />
and “not feasible,” <strong>for</strong> example,<br />
billboard sizes that are too<br />
small, which might result more<br />
accidents due to motorists’ inability<br />
to read the print. The<br />
OAAP’s position paper on the<br />
bill is somewhat more diplomatic.<br />
While it takes issue with<br />
Santiago’s characterization of the<br />
billboard industry as a “blight,”<br />
it agreed with many of the proposal’s<br />
criticisms about current<br />
billboard legislation, adding that<br />
there was much “confusion as<br />
to which government agency”<br />
implements which laws.<br />
ILLICIT “MAGIC”<br />
Still, even MediaPool’s Callao<br />
says that the industry needs to be<br />
more rigorous in self-regulation.<br />
“Because of high consumerism in<br />
the <strong>Philippine</strong>s,” he says, “we (the<br />
ad industry) tend to neglect our<br />
social responsibilities as long as it<br />
will favor ‘my brand’…We have to<br />
regulate ourselves, we have to not<br />
respond to competition. Some of<br />
our members, even if they know<br />
it’s illegal, they will still go <strong>for</strong> it<br />
(erecting billboards).”<br />
This is largely why, say other<br />
industry insiders who decline to<br />
be identified, a common practice<br />
nowadays is to post smaller<br />
billboards on street lamps and<br />
pedestrian overpasses, even<br />
though section 20<strong>01</strong> of the National<br />
Building Code prohibits<br />
outdoor advertisement on “street<br />
furniture” on any national roads.<br />
The insiders add that personnel<br />
and officials of national government<br />
agencies and local governments<br />
often benefit financially<br />
from such legal indiscretions, to<br />
the tune of several hundred million<br />
pesos a year. (One DPWH<br />
architect refers to such arrangements<br />
as “hocus-pocus.”)<br />
Back at the Makati City Hall,<br />
a rummage through billboard<br />
records with Almazan, who is<br />
responsible <strong>for</strong> checking billboards<br />
<strong>for</strong> permits and is authorized<br />
to demolish those without<br />
proper paperwork, yields these<br />
statistics: of 149 billboards, 69<br />
have permits, 72 do not, and<br />
eight await verification. It’s clear<br />
laws are being ignored; since<br />
February 2004, Almazan has<br />
demolished 59 billboards.<br />
In the meantime, Dream<br />
Advertising is dreaming up more<br />
electronic billboards <strong>for</strong> Metro<br />
Manila. Orbos says the benefits<br />
of having such billboards<br />
include “real-time” value, since<br />
the displays can easily be altered<br />
to accommodate, say, urgent<br />
public announcements. He says<br />
his company is planning more<br />
joint ventures with other local<br />
governments. So far, five have<br />
shown interest.<br />
i<br />
Charlene Dy has worked in Hong<br />
Kong, New York, Massachusetts,<br />
and most recently in Shanghai,<br />
where she was a columnist, restaurant<br />
critic, and magazine<br />
editor.<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
25
W O M E N & D I S A S T E R<br />
TESS BACALLA<br />
BANDA ACEH,<br />
Indonesia<br />
RAHMI IS about<br />
14, but has<br />
already lost the<br />
world she knew.<br />
One can see it<br />
in her sad, soulful eyes, and in<br />
her inability to smile. And the<br />
reason is evident just by surveying<br />
what surrounds her here in this<br />
northwestern Sumatran city. Nearly<br />
a year after the powerful Dec. 26<br />
earthquake struck and triggered<br />
tsunamis in several parts of Asia,<br />
this once bustling coastal city<br />
remains desolate. In many areas,<br />
piles of rubble are the only proof<br />
that there were once houses and<br />
buildings there while in others,<br />
muddy boats scattered willy-nilly<br />
far from the shore show just how<br />
strong the waves that swept into<br />
Banda Aceh were. There are also<br />
places where the stench of death<br />
still hangs in the air, even as a few<br />
men sort through the debris.<br />
Save <strong>for</strong> a younger brother,<br />
Rahmi is all that is left of her<br />
family. She doesn’t know it yet,<br />
but Aceh’s female population<br />
in particular has been just as<br />
decimated. In fact, the tsunami<br />
didn’t just flatten this provincial<br />
capital and almost erased it<br />
from the map. It also altered the<br />
demographics of a place that<br />
was already a man’s world to<br />
begin with, and may have paved<br />
the way <strong>for</strong> a hard future <strong>for</strong><br />
Rahmi, a life that will be more<br />
difficult than what her mother or<br />
grandmother had experienced.<br />
The total death toll from the<br />
tsunamis that swamped coastal<br />
communities in Indonesia, Sri<br />
Lanka, Burma, Thailand, India, and<br />
seven other countries was 220,000.<br />
Based on the Indonesia National<br />
Disaster Coordinating Board or<br />
NDCB, more than half of those<br />
deaths were from Aceh. Excluded<br />
in these figures, however, are the<br />
missing, which may be far more<br />
than the fatalities.<br />
In many areas, including<br />
Aceh, most of the missing or<br />
dead are women. In five villages<br />
in Aceh’s Lampu’uk subdistrict,<br />
the women’s group Flower<br />
Aceh says only 40 of the 750<br />
survivors from a population of<br />
5,500 are women. Other local<br />
nongovernmental organizations<br />
and international aid groups have<br />
found similar statistics in other<br />
tsunami-affected communities in<br />
the province. The international<br />
relief group Oxfam says that in<br />
four villages in Aceh Besar district,<br />
male survivors outnumber the<br />
females by a ratio of three to<br />
one. In four villages in North<br />
Aceh, the female death toll made<br />
up 70 percent of the fatalities. In<br />
Kuala Cangkoy, 80 percent of<br />
the dead were female.<br />
Not surprisingly, men<br />
outnumber the women in the<br />
camps and barracks set up <strong>for</strong><br />
“internally displaced people”<br />
or IDPs. International and local<br />
NGOs, as well as U.N. agencies,<br />
worry that if what is happening in<br />
these camps and barracks is any<br />
indication, the Acehnese women<br />
and girls who survived the deadly<br />
waves should brace themselves<br />
<strong>for</strong> what can lie ahead.<br />
HEAVIER BURDENS,<br />
HEIGHTENED RISKS<br />
OF ABUSE<br />
As in other Asian societies, women<br />
are the traditional caregivers in<br />
Aceh, and per<strong>for</strong>m the household<br />
chores. They still per<strong>for</strong>m such<br />
tasks in the camps, but these days<br />
their burden has become heavier<br />
because of the sheer number<br />
of men and children they are<br />
expected to serve and look after.<br />
Be<strong>for</strong>e the tsunami, each Acehnese<br />
household could probably count<br />
on more than a pair of female<br />
hands to do the chores. Today<br />
not only is that no longer true,<br />
women and girls are expected<br />
to help men who are not their<br />
relatives, if only because Acehnese<br />
males are “embarrassed to be seen<br />
doing housework,” says Tesmiati<br />
Emsa, who heads a women’s<br />
NGO based here. Another relief<br />
worker says some widowers left<br />
with children to look after simply<br />
could not cope with the idea of<br />
becoming caregivers even to their<br />
own offspring that they readily<br />
gave these up to an orphanage.<br />
Meanwhile, NGOs and<br />
international aid agencies say<br />
many of the women have been<br />
subjected to sexual harassment<br />
and abuse, while some have<br />
found themselves becoming<br />
victims of physical violence<br />
wielded by bored or frustrated<br />
men. Erwin Setiawan of Flower<br />
Aceh says men are lashing out<br />
partly because of the stressful<br />
conditions in the barracks where<br />
there is a lack of privacy and<br />
where they are unable to practice<br />
their usual means of livelihood.<br />
But he offers no explanation why<br />
women, who are enduring the<br />
same conditions, are not reacting<br />
in the same way and instead are<br />
made to bear the brunt of the<br />
men’s pent-up emotions.<br />
In fact, life in the camps and<br />
the barracks is even more stressful<br />
<strong>for</strong> the women because, say<br />
several observers, their needs were<br />
not taken into consideration in<br />
designing these temporary shelters.<br />
For instance, there are no separate<br />
toilets <strong>for</strong> men and women. Many<br />
of the toilets have no roofs or are<br />
made from just plastic sheets or<br />
sacks, through which peepholes<br />
could easily be cut.<br />
“I heard a lot of cases of men<br />
peeping while women were taking<br />
a bath in their temporary shelters,”<br />
says MB Wijaksana, editor in<br />
chief of Journal Perempuan, a<br />
Jakarta-based women’s magazine.<br />
He says he tried to check with<br />
the police if they were aware of<br />
these cases, which he describes as<br />
<strong>for</strong>ms of sexual harassment, and<br />
found that the authorities had<br />
somehow managed to escape<br />
hearing about them.<br />
Personal supplies such as<br />
underwear and sanitary napkins<br />
have also apparently been<br />
excluded from the list of basic<br />
needs provided in the shelters.<br />
The lack of supply of long-sleeved<br />
shirts and headscarves—essential<br />
to Acehnese women, who are<br />
predominantly Muslim like the<br />
majority of Indonesians—has<br />
remained unchecked. In a press<br />
statement, the U.N. Population<br />
Fund (UNFPA) observed that in<br />
the face of such unmet needs,<br />
“women and girls become reluctant<br />
to carry out public activities and<br />
even access basic needs and<br />
humanitarian assistance.”<br />
As if they didn’t have enough<br />
problems, the women in the<br />
shelters have also had to put<br />
up with the lack of clean water,<br />
which means they are usually<br />
<strong>for</strong>ced to fetch some elsewhere<br />
and lug it back to their quarters.<br />
But according to UNFPA<br />
in<strong>for</strong>mation officer in Indonesia<br />
Maria Hulupi, some barracks are<br />
in areas that make it dangerous<br />
<strong>for</strong> women to venture outside.<br />
As it is, the crowded, maledominated<br />
environment has<br />
meant that women and girls<br />
have had to put up with being<br />
constantly teased and stared at.<br />
FORCED MARRIAGES<br />
The setup of many of the shelters—with<br />
related men and women<br />
staying in the same tent or room<br />
together—has even lent itself to a<br />
RES<br />
AM<br />
Surviving the tsunami. Most of<br />
the victims of the tidal wave that<br />
killed tens of thousands in the<br />
Indonesian province of Aceh last<br />
December were women.<br />
26
ILIENCE<br />
ID RUIN
W O M E N & D I S A S T E R<br />
trend many of the female refugees<br />
do not welcome at all: <strong>for</strong>ced<br />
marriages. Samsidar, who heads<br />
a subcommittee of the National<br />
Commission on Violence against<br />
Women, says young women are<br />
being pressured to marry males<br />
staying in the same tents or barracks.<br />
Such marriages have become<br />
“an in<strong>for</strong>mal rule,” she says.<br />
Journalist Wijaksana, <strong>for</strong> his part,<br />
says that the pressure to marry is<br />
greater on young single women<br />
because he says that in Aceh, virgins<br />
are preferred to widows, who<br />
tend to be looked down upon.<br />
“For men the loss of wife<br />
seems a simple thing,” he adds.<br />
Besides, says Wijaksana, the<br />
shari’ah law <strong>for</strong>bids women from<br />
remarrying within three months<br />
of the deaths of their spouses.<br />
Men can remarry any time. Nana<br />
of the Humanist Institute <strong>for</strong><br />
Cooperation with Developing<br />
Countries (Hivos) cites the case<br />
of a man in Malaboh on the<br />
Sumatran coast who married his<br />
sister-in-law only a week after<br />
his wife disappeared as a result<br />
of the tsunami. He thought she<br />
was dead, says Nana. A month<br />
later, the wife resurfaced.<br />
Oxfam says that <strong>for</strong>ced marriage<br />
has serious implications on<br />
the education, livelihood, and<br />
reproductive health especially of<br />
young women. “Surviving women<br />
may also be encouraged to have<br />
more children, with shorter intervals<br />
between them, to replace<br />
those lost by the community,” it<br />
also says. “Again, this has consequences<br />
<strong>for</strong> their reproductive<br />
health and their ability to earn an<br />
independent income.”<br />
Compared to the men, there<br />
are fewer Acehnese women who<br />
have had some education, since<br />
families give priority to sending<br />
the male children to school. This<br />
practice is rooted in the belief<br />
that the women’s best place is the<br />
home—even though they are not<br />
recognized as household heads.<br />
Hivos’s Nana says some of the<br />
women in the shelters who participate<br />
in cash-<strong>for</strong>-work activities<br />
have admitted to her that all they<br />
could do was cry when their husbands<br />
would not let them leave <strong>for</strong><br />
work without first making sure that<br />
their homes were in order. Such<br />
was their fate, the women said.<br />
The harsh truth is that the<br />
social position of women in Aceh<br />
accounts <strong>for</strong> their disproportionate<br />
number of deaths, say local<br />
and international NGO workers.<br />
Because the tsunami smothered<br />
Double burden. Acehnese<br />
women take part in cash-<strong>for</strong>work<br />
activities organized in<br />
the refugees camps, but they<br />
have to do the housework and<br />
take care of children as well.<br />
the province on a Sunday, most<br />
of the women and children were<br />
at home while many of the men<br />
were out—socializing, running errands,<br />
or fishing. Other men had<br />
also not returned home <strong>for</strong> quite<br />
some time because their jobs were<br />
elsewhere. Ironically, 70 percent<br />
of Aceh’s pre-tsunami population<br />
consisted of women, because men<br />
were either being killed or were<br />
fleeing the conflict between the<br />
Indonesian military and separatist<br />
Free Aceh Movement or GAM.<br />
But most Acehnese women,<br />
unlike the men, do not know<br />
how to climb trees or swim, say<br />
some observers. This made it<br />
difficult <strong>for</strong> them to escape the<br />
raging waters of December 26.<br />
Yet even those who did know<br />
how to climb trees or could swim<br />
perished in the end because they<br />
were either dragged down by<br />
the sheer weight of the children<br />
and other family members that<br />
they tried so hard to save—in<br />
keeping with their traditional role<br />
as caregivers—or succumbed<br />
eventually to fatigue. Observers<br />
theorize that the long, flowing<br />
clothing that <strong>cover</strong> their arms and<br />
legs restricted the movement of<br />
the Acehnese women, frustrating<br />
their escape from the tsunami.<br />
FINDING THEIR VOICE<br />
Aid worker Nana of Hivos fears<br />
that Aceh’s women survivors<br />
could only become a weaker<br />
<strong>for</strong>ce now that their numbers<br />
have been diminished greatly,<br />
while men could emerge more<br />
dominant. Be<strong>for</strong>e the tsunami,<br />
women were already reluctant<br />
to speak, especially in public<br />
gatherings. Even now, despite<br />
all the hardships they have had<br />
to endure in postdisaster Aceh,<br />
many women are hesitant to<br />
voice out their concerns.<br />
But gender and poverty expert<br />
Yulfita Rahardjo says Acehnese<br />
women can strengthen their<br />
position if only they could be<br />
made aware of their rights. She<br />
concedes, though, that men will<br />
have to be educated as well on<br />
gender issues. In a gender training<br />
she conducted a few months<br />
ago in Jakarta <strong>for</strong> the subdistrict<br />
heads and planners in Aceh, she<br />
says it was evident that the participants—mostly<br />
male—did not<br />
understand the concept of gender<br />
and even blamed the women if<br />
they were not being heard, saying<br />
the women refused to talk.<br />
Yet women in Aceh have not<br />
entirely kept mum about their<br />
needs and aspirations. Some, <strong>for</strong><br />
example, have expressed their<br />
desire to go back to their homes<br />
and start a small-scale business so<br />
they could rebuild their lives.<br />
Nani Zulminarni, head of the<br />
women’s rights group Pekka, says<br />
the women in the districts where<br />
her organization operates were<br />
unanimous in saying that they<br />
did not want to be dependent on<br />
others. Alongside their yearning<br />
to work is their dream to have a<br />
house again, a symbol of dignity,<br />
especially <strong>for</strong> Acehnese women.<br />
“No one expressed desperation<br />
and hopelessness,” says Zulminarni,<br />
who notes that providing livelihood<br />
is a very good starting point <strong>for</strong><br />
empowering women. She says the<br />
grassroots women’s groups Pekka<br />
has helped have gained so much<br />
respect that their members are now<br />
being invited to important community<br />
gatherings. Says Zulminarni:<br />
“It’s a good sign.”<br />
Sylvia Agustina, program officer<br />
of the U.N. Development Fund <strong>for</strong><br />
Women (Unifem) says her vision<br />
<strong>for</strong> her fellow Acehnese women is<br />
not just <strong>for</strong> them to return to their<br />
“normal” lives. Agustina, who also<br />
lost a number of her loved ones to<br />
the tsunami, says, “I want them to<br />
have an option.”<br />
Research <strong>for</strong> this story was funded<br />
by a fellowship from the<br />
Southeast Asian Press Alliance<br />
(SEAPA).<br />
i<br />
28 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
Member: <strong>Philippine</strong> Deposit Insurance Corporation (Deposits insured up to P250,000)
U.P. SOCIOLOGY<br />
professor Randy<br />
David rarely talks<br />
about his family<br />
in his popular<br />
column in the<br />
<strong>Philippine</strong> Daily<br />
Inquirer, but sometime last year,<br />
he wrote about his youngest<br />
daughter, Jika. By then already in<br />
her late 20s and enjoying a solid<br />
career at a famous transnational<br />
conglomerate, Jika had surprised<br />
her parents by announcing she<br />
was putting that part of her life<br />
on hold because she had applied<br />
to be part of the Jesuit Volunteers<br />
<strong>Philippine</strong>s (JVP). Jika was sent to<br />
Palawan, where she taught math<br />
to elementary and high school<br />
girls enrolled in a distance education<br />
program.<br />
It was a pleased David who<br />
wrote about his daughter’s decision<br />
to volunteer. Other parents<br />
would probably have reacted<br />
differently, at the very least expressing<br />
puzzlement at why<br />
someone still young and who had<br />
everything going <strong>for</strong> her would<br />
suddenly up and leave to work<br />
somewhere <strong>for</strong> free (JVP provides<br />
modest living allowances). Yet<br />
here is this very pleasant fact: even<br />
in this increasingly consumerist<br />
and cynical society, thousands<br />
of youths are still volunteering,<br />
oftentimes while they are still in<br />
school, but sometimes even when<br />
they are already earning considerable<br />
sums, as Jika David was.<br />
This is evident enough in<br />
<strong>political</strong> rallies, where earnest<br />
young faces far outnumber those<br />
lined with age. But many more<br />
are toiling in relative obscurity,<br />
sometimes <strong>for</strong> just a couple of<br />
hours at a time in underserved<br />
communities in the city, others<br />
<strong>for</strong> months or even a year in a<br />
remote barangay.<br />
Volunteering has become so<br />
popular, there is now even a<br />
website called ivolunteer (http://<br />
www.ivolunteer.ph) that “seeks<br />
to promote volunteerism <strong>for</strong><br />
social development.” At last<br />
count, the site listed more than<br />
60 organizations, from Davao to<br />
Ilocos. Many more are out there,<br />
relatively unknown but engaging<br />
the youth in activities beyond the<br />
usual gimik or nights out with<br />
their katropa.<br />
Volunteerism or the giving<br />
of self <strong>for</strong> the good of others<br />
is actually a neat fit in a country<br />
where the individual is not<br />
recognized unless he or she is<br />
part of a group. It is also an easy<br />
dovetail to the traditional Filipino<br />
concept of bayanihan or of a<br />
community working together. “It<br />
is part of the Filipino value system,<br />
the motivating factor being<br />
the kaluluwa (soul) and budhi<br />
(conscience) , and that part of our<br />
Pagkataong Filipino (being Filipino)<br />
is pakikipag-kapwa (being<br />
good to others),” say academics<br />
VOLUNTEERS FOR THE<br />
ENVIRONMENT. Many<br />
young people are joining the<br />
innovative protest actions<br />
of Greenpeace, where they<br />
are initiated to volunteerism<br />
(this photo and below).<br />
A GIFT OF SELF<br />
Grace Aguiling Dalisay, Jay Yacat,<br />
and Atoy Navarro in the book<br />
Extending the Self: Volunteering<br />
as Pakikipag-kapwa. They argue<br />
that everything starts from the<br />
individual as part of a family.<br />
“Sambahayan is seen as the foundation<br />
of pamayanan, samahan,<br />
and sambayanan,” they say,<br />
emphasizing the importance of<br />
the family to the community and<br />
the country.<br />
Dalisay and company had actually<br />
done a study that looked into<br />
what made individual volunteers<br />
tick. Foremost among the motivations<br />
was the element of social<br />
compassion and its ingrained<br />
feel-good effect. Volunteers also<br />
talked about commitment to the<br />
cause, sense of satisfaction and<br />
achievement derived from continued<br />
service, sense of purpose<br />
and personal meaning, and faith.<br />
Ironically, it also turned out that<br />
the giving of self usually meant<br />
benefits such as self-dis<strong>cover</strong>y,<br />
self-enhancement, and the realization<br />
of one’s true worth.<br />
RANDY DAVID didn’t say what<br />
had prompted Jika to join the<br />
JVP, although he did remember<br />
asking her at one point if she<br />
was happy at work. He had been<br />
worried about her, since she<br />
seemed to be too preoccupied<br />
with her job and was putting in<br />
extra-long hours that had her going<br />
home very late at night.<br />
“My inquiry surprised her,”<br />
wrote David. “I realized I was<br />
talking to a member of a new<br />
generation of highly disciplined<br />
and driven young people who<br />
worked hard and partied hard.”<br />
“Frugal to a fault, she saved a big<br />
part of her earnings <strong>for</strong> graduate<br />
studies abroad as well as <strong>for</strong> a<br />
yearly vacation to some faraway<br />
place,” said Jika’s father. “She liked<br />
going out with friends on Friday<br />
and Saturday evenings. She was<br />
bourgeois in every way. Watching<br />
her steady trans<strong>for</strong>mation into a<br />
corporate yuppie, I once ironically<br />
remarked to my wife that perhaps<br />
we were going to have, at last, a<br />
real capitalist in the family. Now I<br />
know I was way off the mark.”<br />
It could very well be that the<br />
young David had been inspired<br />
by the example of her parents,<br />
who are both academics yet well<br />
known in the NGO community.<br />
But Jika’s father also recalled that<br />
she had always wanted to be a<br />
teacher, a dream derailed somewhat<br />
by her early success in the<br />
corporate world. Then again, she<br />
could have just decided simply to<br />
try helping bring change—even<br />
just by a little bit—in a country<br />
that has too long a list of woes.<br />
Her father also said nothing<br />
about what she had been involved<br />
in during college. But <strong>for</strong> sure,<br />
aside from her family, Jika’s alma<br />
mater, the University of the <strong>Philippine</strong>s<br />
(UP), offered her more than<br />
enough examples of youths who<br />
were trying to make a difference<br />
in their own small way. The volunteer<br />
organization Ugnayan sa<br />
Pahinungod (literally Self-offering<br />
Network), <strong>for</strong> instance, has been<br />
30 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
Y O U T H V O L U N T E E R S<br />
attracting students since it was<br />
<strong>for</strong>med in UP in 1994. By the late<br />
1990s, it was sending more than<br />
1,000 volunteers a year in different<br />
parts of the country, and collaborating<br />
with the Department of<br />
Social Welfare and Development<br />
and the Department of Environment<br />
and Natural Resources, as<br />
well as organizations such as Red<br />
Cross, the Magsaysay Agutaya<br />
Foundation, and the UP-based<br />
Kontra-Gapi.<br />
Pahinungod used to get at<br />
least P1 million from congressional<br />
pork-barrel funds. But<br />
that stopped in 20<strong>01</strong>, and the<br />
organization has since managed<br />
to survive by having the participating<br />
colleges in the UP system<br />
look <strong>for</strong> their own funding. Today,<br />
Pahinungod has even more volunteers.<br />
In UP Manila alone, it has<br />
a pool of 2,000.<br />
Lilibeth ‘Lib’ Perez is one of<br />
Pahinungod’s newest recruits.<br />
Still in the early stages of training,<br />
she sets aside two to three hours<br />
a week <strong>for</strong> seminars and workshops.<br />
The 17-year-old social science<br />
student is currently learning<br />
to make cards, and is scheduled<br />
to share those skills later with<br />
Manila’s streetchildren. But what<br />
she is really looking <strong>for</strong>ward to is<br />
the summer immersion program<br />
where she and other Pahinungod<br />
volunteers will live <strong>for</strong> a month in<br />
poor villages in Southern Luzon.<br />
Long after graduation, many<br />
UP alumni are still helping with<br />
Pahinungod projects. But students<br />
remain the lifeblood of the<br />
organization. If not <strong>for</strong> anything<br />
else, the idealism of youth fuels<br />
their enthusiasm. But Oscar Ferrer,<br />
pioneering coordinator of<br />
Pahinungod at the UP Diliman<br />
campus, also explains, “Most<br />
young people in school usually<br />
do not have that much commitment<br />
in the household. Save<br />
<strong>for</strong> the usual responsibilities of<br />
helping out in housework, most<br />
of them often find themselves<br />
with a lot of time to hang out,<br />
or to discern and examine their<br />
purpose in life and their future.<br />
Volunteer work allows them not<br />
only to bond with their peers,<br />
it also rein<strong>for</strong>ces their sense of<br />
worth and self-respect and gives<br />
them deep regard <strong>for</strong> other<br />
people.”<br />
BECAUSE IT asks <strong>for</strong> at least<br />
a year of service from its volunteers,<br />
the Ateneo-based JVP<br />
attracts mostly new graduates<br />
who want to help others be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
focusing on their careers. Floyd<br />
‘Noy-Noy’ Tena was a 23-yearold<br />
Ateneo de Naga graduate<br />
when he was sent by the JVP<br />
to Compostela Valley in 20<strong>01</strong> as<br />
a “senior coalition builder.” In<br />
lay terms, Tena was supposed<br />
to help residents and local officials<br />
work together to develop<br />
their areas. That could have<br />
been a <strong>for</strong>midable task even <strong>for</strong><br />
the most seasoned community<br />
organizer, but Tena more than<br />
held up gracefully, and even<br />
took to sliding through muddy<br />
roads with much joy.<br />
Perhaps it helped that just<br />
several weeks after arriving in<br />
Compostela, it had dawned on<br />
Tena why he was there. In a<br />
letter excerpted at the ivolunteer<br />
website, he wrote, “When I entered<br />
the JVP, one of my reasons<br />
was service. That simple. But<br />
my everyday ‘journey’ here has<br />
deepened the meaning and my<br />
experience of that service—it is a<br />
mission. A mission to serve Him<br />
in any way possible. A mission<br />
that shows us that God can be<br />
found not only in church or in the<br />
oratory but also in every person<br />
we encounter each day. A mission<br />
to serve—service that comes<br />
from the giving of self, giving that<br />
comes from love that is lubos,<br />
buhos, ubos (the utmost).”<br />
Krishna Jennifer Sonza, better<br />
known as ‘Kang,’ was in the same<br />
JVP batch as Tena. Then a 20-yearold<br />
graduate of Ateneo de Davao,<br />
Sonza was assigned as a basic<br />
literacy facilitator to the lumad<br />
children of Bindum, Bukidnon<br />
where, the JVP said, there was no<br />
electricity but plenty of “natural<br />
water resources.” In her letters,<br />
Sonza’s excitement over being<br />
a Jesuit volunteer was palpable.<br />
But one particular letter had her<br />
confessing doubts.<br />
“Why am I here if they can’t<br />
seem to learn the lessons I am<br />
teaching them?” she wrote in 20<strong>01</strong>.<br />
“Why am I teaching these kids<br />
who seem to be so dense? Why?<br />
Why? I was asking myself what<br />
my purpose was in this area. Then<br />
I suddenly remembered I was<br />
inside my classroom and my students<br />
were all staring at me. And<br />
I mean staring as if to ask, now<br />
why is ate (older sister) seemingly<br />
out of sorts? Nahiya gyud ako (I<br />
felt so ashamed). I was looking<br />
<strong>for</strong> meaning, I was asking why,<br />
and the answer was right there<br />
in front of me. There were the<br />
kids reminding me that hey, we<br />
are the reason why you are here.”<br />
WITH THE sheer number of organizations<br />
involved in volunteer<br />
work and the variety of situations<br />
that need to be addressed,<br />
anyone who is willing to give up<br />
some time could probably find<br />
something that would suit his<br />
or her interest, skills, and schedule.<br />
Apart from campus-based<br />
groups, there are thousands more<br />
sponsored by local communities<br />
and church organizations, as well<br />
as by high-profile groups such<br />
as Greenpeace and Worldwide<br />
Fund <strong>for</strong> Nature. In the last two<br />
decades alone, organized volunteerism<br />
has gained strength,<br />
in part because of the advocacy<br />
of causes such as global poverty,<br />
hunger, and HIV/AIDS by<br />
international celebrities (think<br />
Bono and Bob Geldof), and also<br />
because of the increased—and<br />
Personal journey. For<br />
many young people,<br />
volunteering <strong>for</strong> social<br />
or civic work is part of<br />
a search <strong>for</strong> meaning.<br />
welcomed—participation of<br />
NGOs in development work<br />
across the country. Many of those<br />
who volunteer may also have<br />
found inspiration in EDSA 1 and<br />
2, which, despite all the flak they<br />
are now getting, did demonstrate<br />
just what could be accomplished<br />
if people banded together <strong>for</strong> a<br />
single cause.<br />
Yet while the urge to help<br />
someone in need is probably<br />
innate in everyone, volunteerism<br />
attracts certain personalities, and<br />
especially those who have a passion<br />
to serve people and have<br />
good interpersonal skills. But not<br />
only do many youths volunteer<br />
anyway, a significant number of<br />
them wind up having careers later<br />
in community service or in professions<br />
that emphasize service such<br />
as teaching and yes, journalism.<br />
The Jesuit volunteers call it being<br />
“ruined <strong>for</strong> life”—but in a good<br />
way, of course.<br />
Jika David may end up being<br />
“ruined <strong>for</strong> life,” too. Early this<br />
year, her father mentioned her<br />
again in his column, reporting<br />
that she was thinking of extending<br />
her stay in Palawan. Randy<br />
David wrote that he and his wife<br />
had been looking <strong>for</strong>ward to seeing<br />
their daughter home again,<br />
and so he had tried to convince<br />
Jika that there were other ways<br />
of helping out the girls there in<br />
their studies. Besides, wasn’t she<br />
thinking of getting an MBA?<br />
But Jika had replied that her<br />
life “is going on here perfectly.<br />
It is the first time I have felt that<br />
I am doing something that has<br />
meaning not only <strong>for</strong> me but<br />
also <strong>for</strong> other people, like these<br />
girls who have not had the same<br />
chances in life.”<br />
Her father then recounted that<br />
when he and Jika’s mother had<br />
paid her a visit months be<strong>for</strong>e,<br />
the founder of the school where<br />
she was assigned had thanked<br />
them. Apparently, Jika and another<br />
female volunteer were not<br />
only teaching the girls Math and<br />
English, they were also providing<br />
their students with “alternative<br />
images of what they can be.”<br />
And so, wrote David, “my heart<br />
tells me she has chosen the right<br />
path. For all the dark thoughts we<br />
often harbor about our country,”<br />
said Jika David’s proud, proud<br />
father, “I truly think we are far<br />
from doomed as a nation. Our<br />
children give us hope.”<br />
i<br />
With reporting by Tess Raposas.<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
31
i<br />
> Pinoy Political Humor<br />
Master impersonator. In<br />
2004, Willie Nep did uncanny<br />
impressions of Ping Lacson (left),<br />
FPJ (standing, center), and Raul<br />
Roco (extreme right). Below,<br />
Tessie Tomas is best remembered<br />
<strong>for</strong> being “Meldita.”<br />
Impersonating<br />
Presiden<br />
ELVIRA MATA<br />
IT MIGHT have started when this president<br />
sang a folk song after what could<br />
only be assumed as great sex. Soon everyone<br />
was singing “Pamulinawen” off-key.<br />
Since then, presidential impersonators<br />
have outnumbered presidential wannabes.<br />
There’s always someone spoofing a<br />
president—dead or alive—on TV, during<br />
concerts, Halloween parties, and from time<br />
to time, at people power marches on Edsa.<br />
There are a few who stand out, who<br />
have endured a revolution or two and<br />
became icons. Willie Nepomuceno, Tessie<br />
Tomas, and Jon Santos have been around<br />
longer than some of the presidents and<br />
presidential wannabes (Cory, FVR, Erap,<br />
FPJ, GMA, Roco, Ping, Bro. Eddie, and Eddie<br />
Gil) they’ve emulated.<br />
Michael V’s GMA in the top-rated TV<br />
show “Bubble Gang” was more cartoon<br />
than impersonation. He wore a bad wig,<br />
buck teeth, a mole as big as a bug, and to<br />
approximate the president’s size, stayed<br />
close to the ground with legs bent. He was<br />
hilarious but the presidential task <strong>for</strong>ce on<br />
<strong>political</strong>ly correct humor didn’t think so<br />
and it’s been a year since Bitoy morphed<br />
into Gloria.<br />
Rene Boy Facunla, the real person<br />
inside Ate Glow, is the youngest (he’s 24)<br />
and the latest to join this band of Excellencies.<br />
He was (and still is) a student at the<br />
University of the <strong>Philippine</strong>s when he first<br />
slipped into GMA’s high-heeled pumps.<br />
This was in January 20<strong>01</strong>, a few days after<br />
Edsa 2, which ousted Erap and installed<br />
GMA as president. The remarkable thing<br />
about Ate Glow is he looks and sounds<br />
like GMA, even when he’s not per<strong>for</strong>ming.<br />
“But I’m taller,” he says.<br />
But then, so is almost everyone else.<br />
For this issue, we decided to do a<br />
<strong>for</strong>um of these five presidential impersonators—first<br />
as themselves and later, as their<br />
favorite presidents.<br />
Confused? So is the country. Deal with it.<br />
32 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
Close to tears. Rene<br />
Boy Facunla emotes<br />
as “Ate Glow,” who<br />
keeps her cellphone<br />
with her even in bed.<br />
ts<br />
PHOTO LILEN UY<br />
MAKEUP CATHY CANTADA<br />
HAIR JERRY JAVIER<br />
STYLIST GUADA REYES<br />
SPECIAL THANKS TO MANDY NAVASERO<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
33
Pinoy Political Humor<br />
Many faces. Michael V<br />
in real life is Beethoven<br />
Bunagan, but he has<br />
other lives as well.<br />
ON THE STREET, YOU ARE OFTEN<br />
MISTAKEN FOR…<br />
Willie Nepomuceno: Not too many<br />
people recognize me immediately but<br />
those who do, jokingly call me Mr.<br />
President, Dolphy, Erap or FPJ and years<br />
earlier, Makoy or His Eminence.<br />
Tessie Tomas: There was a time they called<br />
me Amanda Finida, Imelda, Barbara Tengco.<br />
Ngayon, they call me Teysi because of the<br />
impact of “Teysi ng Tahanan.”<br />
Jon Santos: Wala. When I’m not made<br />
up as any of my characters, I’m quite<br />
unrecognizable. A friend once told me,<br />
though, that if Leonardo DiCaprio and<br />
Reese Witherspoon had an ugly baby<br />
together, that would be me. That person<br />
is no longer my friend.<br />
Michael V: They look around <strong>for</strong><br />
cameras checking if they’re on the TV<br />
show “Bitoy’s Funniest Videos.” Be<strong>for</strong>e<br />
they used to call me Bebang, a character<br />
I play, or Michael V.<br />
Rene Boy Facunla: Ate Glow. Maraming<br />
tao ang hindi natutuwa kay Gloria, pero<br />
sa akin natutuwa sila. Pinapaabot nila<br />
sa masayang salita ‘yung gusto nilang<br />
ipaabot sa kanya. For example, madalas<br />
ako tanungin, “O Ate Glow, kelan ka ba<br />
bababa sa puwesto? (Many people don’t<br />
appreciate Gloria, but they appreciate me.<br />
They tell me nicely what they want to tell<br />
her. For example, I’m often asked, “O Ate<br />
Glow, when are you resigning?)”<br />
WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT?<br />
Willie: No one really. But since it has<br />
become some sort of social responsibility<br />
<strong>for</strong> me to do impressions of presidents,<br />
I have to know more about them. In<br />
the process, I found them to be quite<br />
interesting people—Erap, in particular.<br />
Tessie: Bill Clinton. Except <strong>for</strong> the Monica<br />
Lewinsky episode, he did a good job of<br />
running the country. He was sensible and<br />
he was well-liked.<br />
Jon: Violeta Paderon. She is the president<br />
of the Vilmanians of Lucena Fan Club—<br />
pero last term na niya.<br />
Michael V: Ferdinand Marcos. I’m going to<br />
get a lot of flak <strong>for</strong> my choice, but during<br />
his time, malinis ang Pilipinas, maayos (the<br />
<strong>Philippine</strong>s was clean and orderly). I also<br />
supported Cory at Edsa, pero after that…<br />
Rene Boy: Siyempre si Gloria. Kasi<br />
binigyan niya ako ng trabaho (Gloria<br />
of course, because she gave me a job).<br />
Without her, I wouldn’t be in showbiz.<br />
WHAT IS YOUR RING TONE?<br />
Willie: “Toreador.” I’ve always enjoyed<br />
classical music and fancied conducting<br />
an invisible orchestra even in my youth.<br />
The opportunity came last year when I<br />
was invited to conduct the entire Manila<br />
Philharmonic Orchestra in a show at the<br />
Aliw Theater. The surprise of my life? The<br />
piece assigned to me was “ Toreador.”<br />
Tessie: “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”<br />
><br />
WILLIE NEPOMUCENO<br />
Willie Nepomuceno is<br />
best known <strong>for</strong> his impressions<br />
of two dead<br />
presidents—Ferdinand<br />
Marcos and Fernando<br />
Poe Jr. (he won di ba?),<br />
and a chief executive<br />
who’s alive but incarcerated—FPJ’s<br />
best friend,<br />
Joseph Estrada.<br />
Willie Nep gently objects<br />
to being called “impersonator,”<br />
preferring<br />
to call what he does as<br />
“impressions.” He says, “Impersonation<br />
is simply copying<br />
something. I’d like to think<br />
that I go beyond that. It’s like<br />
‘painting’ an impression of a<br />
scene, situation or character.<br />
What you see is not necessarily<br />
the person’s character per<br />
se, but my impression of that<br />
person’s character.”<br />
Willie has been doing<br />
impressions <strong>for</strong> more than<br />
30 years. As a young boy in<br />
the 1950s, he would imitate<br />
the Reycard Duet, Bobby<br />
Gonzales, and Sylvia la Torre<br />
to amuse his classmates in<br />
Marikina.<br />
He was a fine arts student<br />
at the University of the <strong>Philippine</strong>s<br />
when he started doing<br />
his Marcos impressions. An<br />
activist, he would entertain<br />
the crowd be<strong>for</strong>e the speeches<br />
against the usual fascists.<br />
Later, he was hired as<br />
a broadcaster <strong>for</strong> ABS-<br />
CBN’s “Radyo Patrol,”<br />
and was subsequently<br />
cast as part of the<br />
original “Super Laff-In.”<br />
In one of his many interviews,<br />
Willie described his first<br />
break in showbiz: “I had a hard<br />
time because the criteria were<br />
different: You had to be tall<br />
and good-looking; talent was<br />
not necessary. My strategy<br />
to break into showbiz was to<br />
imitate the famous—now I’m<br />
stuck in it. I can’t sing in my<br />
own voice, I have to sing in<br />
other people’s voices.”<br />
His last solo show<br />
was “Willie Nep <strong>for</strong> President”<br />
in 2004 where he<br />
impersonated most of the<br />
candidates as well as other<br />
characters. Last June, he<br />
did “Hello Garci” during the<br />
Kapihan sa Manila’s 20 th<br />
anniversary show.<br />
A few days after his interview<br />
with i-report, he flew<br />
to the United States to check<br />
up on Garci’s new look and<br />
to research on compatriot<br />
Leandro Aragoncillo, the first<br />
White House spy.<br />
Nah. He’s there to<br />
do shows and <strong>for</strong> some<br />
R & R.<br />
34 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT
The real thing.<br />
Jon Santos does a<br />
thumbs up with the<br />
real Steady Eddie.<br />
Frustration ko maging ballet dancer.<br />
Jon: My beeper doesn’t have one. Pero<br />
i-che-check ko sa Greenhills kung puedeng<br />
magpa-install. Aba, mahirap nang mahuli<br />
sa technology. (But I’m going to check in<br />
Greenhills if it can be installed. Why, you<br />
have to keep up with technology.)<br />
Michael V: The tunes in the video games<br />
“Need <strong>for</strong> Speed Underground” and “Fight<br />
Night.” May ring tone din ako na boses<br />
ng anak ko (I have a ring tone that’s my<br />
child’s voice).<br />
Rene Boy: Naka silent lagi ang cellphone<br />
ko kaya matagal ako sumagot ng text (My<br />
cell phone’s always on silent mode, that’s<br />
why I’m slow at answering text messages).<br />
WHAT CELLPHONE DO YOU OWN?<br />
Willie: Nokia.<br />
Tessie: Ano ba ‘tong nakasulat? “Samsung<br />
Exciting.” I changed my phone two<br />
years ago. My last phone was a 3210 and<br />
everyone was laughing at me. Bakit ka<br />
TESSIE TOMAS<br />
If Willie Nep is the king of<br />
presidential impersonators,<br />
Tessie Tomas is First<br />
Lady. From the late 1980s<br />
to the early ‘90s, Tessie<br />
didn’t just give an excellent<br />
impersonation of Imelda<br />
Marcos, she made Meldita<br />
her own. She was so convincing,<br />
she was cast as<br />
Imelda in the TV movie,<br />
“A Dangerous Life,” which<br />
was shown in the United<br />
States in 1988.<br />
The daughter of radio<br />
legend Laura Hermosa, Tessie<br />
started in radio when<br />
she was nine years old. She<br />
worked in advertising <strong>for</strong> 10<br />
years be<strong>for</strong>e she got her first<br />
break in showbiz as Amanda<br />
Finida, a spoof of weatherman<br />
Amado Pineda, in the TV gag<br />
show “Champoy.” She also<br />
popularized Barbara Tengco,<br />
socialite wife of a corrupt<br />
congressman in the TV sitcom<br />
“Abangan ang Susunod na<br />
pa naka 3210? But it works! Baduy ako sa<br />
telefono. I’m always the last one to change<br />
phones. I have a new phone but it’s still in<br />
the box. I’m so proud to be low-tech.<br />
Jon: Only the latest state-of-the-art beeper<br />
<strong>for</strong> me. Easycall, but of course! Ako pa.<br />
Michael V: Sony Ericsson P910i. It’s a<br />
fun phone and it does everything—word<br />
processing, voice recording, it has a<br />
camera, a music player, I can make<br />
sketches and save them as files. And<br />
when I dress it up, lagyan ng wig, ngipin<br />
at ilong (put on it a wig, teeth, and a<br />
nose), it can do impersonations. I also<br />
have a Nokia 6630 quad band phone. It’s<br />
handy when you’re always traveling. You<br />
can use it in Japan, Europe, and the U.S.<br />
Rene Boy: Nokia 6600. It was given to me<br />
by Globe president and CEO Gerry Ablaza.<br />
NORANIAN OR VILMANIAN?<br />
Willie: I became a Nora fan in the<br />
early ‘70s. In fact, when I was a virtual<br />
Kabanata.” She followed that<br />
up with a daily morning show<br />
a la “Oprah” called “Teysi ng<br />
Tahanan,” making her the<br />
queen of daytime talk shows<br />
<strong>for</strong> six years.<br />
Tessie is acknowledged<br />
as the pioneer in stand-up<br />
comedy, paving the way <strong>for</strong><br />
comics like Candy Pangilinan,<br />
Allan K, and Tessie’s protégé<br />
Jon Santos. Today she stars in<br />
the top-rated sitcom, “Bahay<br />
Mo Ba ‘To,” on GMA-7 and<br />
hosts a new show, “Pusong<br />
Wagi,” on Channel 11.<br />
unknown in showbiz, I did an oil portrait<br />
depicting her as a grand old lady and my<br />
dedication read, “Fifty years from now<br />
and you’ll still be a Superstar!” I’m more<br />
or less 15 years closer to my prediction.<br />
I wonder if she kept that painting? In the<br />
late ‘80s, however, I was charmed by the<br />
sophisticated personality of Vilma.<br />
Tessie: Nora, I admire as an actress.<br />
Vilma, I admire as an actress and a friend.<br />
Jon: Guess.<br />
Michael V: The V in Michael is <strong>for</strong> …<br />
Rene Boy: Nora. Kasi she won all the<br />
major acting awards. She’s also been<br />
through a lot.<br />
Just <strong>for</strong> fun, we asked our impressionists<br />
extraordinaire to assume the personality<br />
of their favorite president (or First Lady)<br />
and answer a few questions. Everyone<br />
thought it was an easy enough request<br />
except <strong>for</strong> Jon Santos who was faced with<br />
a quandary, or should we say, quandaries?<br />
She is also involved in<br />
civic work, helping her less<strong>for</strong><br />
tunate town mates in<br />
Catbalogan, Samar, with<br />
education scholarships.<br />
In addition,<br />
she is the<br />
PRO <strong>for</strong> Community<br />
and Family<br />
Services International<br />
(CFSI), an<br />
NGO that helps<br />
women and children<br />
displaced<br />
by the war in<br />
Mindanao.<br />
Her favorite impersonation<br />
is that of Mrs. Pullin,<br />
devoted wife to Roger<br />
Pullin, a marine-biologistcum-jazz-musician.<br />
TT describes their<br />
relationship: “He’s<br />
a ver y Brit husband,<br />
coping with<br />
a wacky wife who’s<br />
moody but very loving,<br />
charming, and<br />
whom he can ask<br />
to make coffee and<br />
look after him when<br />
he’s sick.”<br />
<<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
35
i<br />
> Pinoy Political Humor<br />
Double trouble. Willie<br />
Nep is hilarious as FPJ’s<br />
double, while Tessie<br />
Tomas’s Meldita is the<br />
caricature of a caricature.<br />
><br />
He wanted to do all presidents.<br />
He explained, “It’s so difficult to<br />
choose. Love ko silang lahat—Tita Koree,<br />
Heneral Eddie, Syerrap, and Tita Glorring.<br />
It’s like asking me to choose my<br />
favorite child. They are all so fascinating<br />
and colorful. Literally. Kasi may Mellow<br />
Yellow (Koree), Kleen and Green (Eddie),<br />
at may dalawang Pretty Im-peach<br />
(Syerrap and Glorring). I guess depending<br />
on the topic, iba-iba sa kanila ang<br />
pumo-possess sa akin.”<br />
Since he put it that way—Jon, be<br />
yourselves. As <strong>for</strong> the rest of the<br />
presidential posse, the following is their<br />
impression of the state of the nation.<br />
WHAT ARE THE TOP THREE PROB-<br />
LEMS OF THE COUNTRY?<br />
Willie channeling Erap: The top three<br />
problems of the country are breakfast,<br />
lunch, and dinner. There’s not enough<br />
food at the Filipino family’s table from<br />
sun up to sundown. They deserve a<br />
decent meal even on a small budget. I<br />
propose a linkage with the food chains<br />
to provide Pinoys with value meals—<br />
may softdrinks na, may French fries pa!<br />
Tessie internalizing Meldita: (Sings)<br />
Don’t cry <strong>for</strong> me Argentina... Top three<br />
problems? National amnesia. Yung may<br />
kasalanan today, bukas nakalimutan at<br />
JON SANTOS<br />
Jon Santos has two new<br />
preoccupations: getting<br />
to know Okrah, a new<br />
character he’s developing<br />
based on talk show<br />
queen Oprah Winfrey,<br />
and the search <strong>for</strong> the<br />
perfect murse.<br />
A murse, as defi ned<br />
by urbandictionary.com,<br />
is a male nurse. It is<br />
also a man’s purse, of<br />
which Jon has six. But<br />
he’s still looking.<br />
In the age of the cellphone,<br />
the PDA, the car’s<br />
locking/alarm/ignition system<br />
remote, and lest we<br />
<strong>for</strong>get the iPod, real men<br />
carry murses.<br />
Jon shows off his recent<br />
purchase from New<br />
York: a murse in off-white,<br />
shiny faux leather, which<br />
looks like a cross between<br />
a man’s clutch bag and a<br />
napatawad na natin. (Someone may be<br />
found guilty today, but by tomorrow,<br />
that’s already <strong>for</strong>gotten and <strong>for</strong>given.)<br />
Jon possessed by Syerrap: Puede bang<br />
top 3,000 problems? Actually, isa lang ang<br />
solusyon sa lahat ng iyan. Awatin natin<br />
ang pagtaas ng oil. ‘Yun lang. Delikado<br />
‘yan pag tumaas. Susunod kasi sa pagtaas<br />
ng presyo ng oil, ang pagtaas ng presyo ng<br />
powder at lotion. (Actually, there is only<br />
one solution. Stop oil prices from going<br />
up. It’s dangerous when oil prices rise.<br />
After that will come increases in the prices<br />
of powder and lotion.)<br />
Michael V spoofing GMA: Ang pagtutuligsa<br />
sa aking pagkapresidente, ang<br />
pagtutuligsa sa aking asawa, at ang<br />
pagtutuligsa sa aking anak. Naapektuhan<br />
lahat dahil dito. Dapat isinasantabi muna<br />
‘yan at mag-boxing muna tayo. Pag may<br />
boxing, nagkakaisa ang madlang Pilipino.<br />
Wala silang iniintindi. Nakakalimutan<br />
ang problema. Lahat sila nasa likod ni<br />
Manny Pacquiao. (The finding of fault in<br />
my presidency, in my husband, in my son.<br />
Everything is affected because of these.<br />
These should all be set aside while we<br />
box. When there’s boxing, the Filipinos<br />
become one. They are oblivious to<br />
everything else, they <strong>for</strong>get their problems,<br />
they are all behind Manny Pacquiao)<br />
Go, Manny, go!<br />
lady’s shoulder bag.<br />
He just got home from a<br />
successful U.S. tour of “In<br />
Kilitikal Condition,” a show<br />
he did with Nanette Inventor<br />
and Leo Martinez, and<br />
directed by Freddie Santos.<br />
They are currently working<br />
on Manila shows scheduled<br />
at the end of the year, and<br />
dreaming of a London and<br />
European tour, hopefully to<br />
start early next year.<br />
He talks a little about<br />
the show: “It’s meant <strong>for</strong> the<br />
Rene Boy being Ate Glow: Traffic, drugs<br />
at kulang sa bigas. Kulang tayo sa<br />
nutrisyon. Siguro kailangan mamahagi<br />
ulit ng nutribuns. (Traffic, drugs, and rice<br />
shortage. We lack nutrition. Maybe<br />
nutribuns should be distributed again.)<br />
WHAT IS YOUR MOST PRESIDENTIAL<br />
MOMENT?<br />
Willie as Erap: Swearing in as President at<br />
the historic Barasoain Church in Bulacan.<br />
Tessie as Meldita: Noong pinagawa ko<br />
ang Cultural <strong>Center</strong> of the <strong>Philippine</strong>s—<br />
kese hodang libagin na ngayon ‘yan, may<br />
daga sa kisame, binabaha ang banyo at<br />
hindi gumagana ang flush. Noong<br />
panahon ko, si George Hamilton at Van<br />
Cliburn ang pumapanhik diyan. World<br />
class ang CCP. Ngayon, maski sino<br />
puedeng mag-concert. Ngayon, maitim na<br />
maitim na ang CCP. Puede ba maski<br />
kalburo, i-repaint n’yo? (When I had the<br />
Cultural <strong>Center</strong> of the <strong>Philippine</strong>s constructed—who<br />
cares if it’s now grimy,<br />
there are mice in the ceiling, the toilets<br />
flood, and the flush doesn’t work. During<br />
my time, the likes of George Hamilton<br />
and Van Cliburn graced that building. It<br />
was world class. Now practically everyone<br />
can have a concert there. It’s now so<br />
dirty. Can someone try to at least whitewash<br />
it?)<br />
homesick Pinoys abroad.<br />
The setup is that there are<br />
secret agents on a mission<br />
to work on our country’s image.<br />
Armida Siguion-Reyna<br />
(Jon) has proposed the revival<br />
of real Filipino<br />
music. Doña Buding<br />
(Nanette) gives<br />
her own take on<br />
what the country’s<br />
problems are. Sen.<br />
Manhik Manaog (Martinez)<br />
has his own<br />
plat<strong>for</strong>m. Ate Vi<br />
(Jon) wants showbiz to go<br />
global…”<br />
Oh.<br />
Jon is set to do a<br />
show with John Lapus<br />
titled “Ang Ganda,” produced<br />
by Pops Fernandez.<br />
If there are no<br />
hitches—like an impeachment<br />
or a<br />
coup—it will run<br />
all weekends<br />
i n N o v e m -<br />
ber, he<br />
says.<br />
36 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT
All my presidents. Erap<br />
(center) is Willie Nep’s favorite<br />
president, but then he likes<br />
Ramos (left) and Marcos<br />
(right), too.<br />
Jon as Tita Glorring: Siyempre when I<br />
returned to the Palace, no longer as a<br />
presidential daughter, but as president na.<br />
I went straight to my <strong>for</strong>mer bedroom.<br />
Hindi nagbago! (Nothing changed!) There<br />
they were—the same bed, the same table<br />
and the same chair I used as a little girl!<br />
Kasya pa rin ako. Hindi din pala nagbago<br />
ang aking height. (I could still fit. My<br />
height also didn’t change.)<br />
Michael V as GMA: Noong pinagsisipa ng<br />
mga tao si Erap at ako na ang pinroklamang<br />
presidente. Ngayon hindi na ako<br />
natutuwa sa mga tao kasi parang gusto<br />
nilang ulitin sa akin ‘yung ginawa nila<br />
kay Erap. (When people kicked Erap<br />
around and I was proclaimed president. But<br />
now the people don’t amuse me because it<br />
looks like they want to repeat what they did<br />
to Erap, but this time with me.)<br />
Rene Boy as Ate Glow: When Erap was<br />
ousted at ako ang nanumpa sa Edsa.<br />
WHAT IS YOUR LEAST PRESIDENTIAL<br />
MOMENT?<br />
Willie as Erap: Taking a boat ride as an<br />
exile out of the historic Malacañang Palace<br />
like a Katrina refugee by the Pasig River.<br />
Tessie as Meldita: Aba noong pinalayas<br />
ninyo kami. Mga walanghiya! Akala ko<br />
Paoay! Bakit kami napunta sa Hawaii!<br />
Puro pinya ang kinain ko doon. Sumakit<br />
MICHAEL V<br />
H i s r e a l n a m e i s<br />
Beethoven Bunagan or<br />
Bitoy. No kidding.<br />
S o w h e r e d i d<br />
Michael V come from?<br />
In an interview with the<br />
late Inday Badiday, he<br />
said it was a combo<br />
of the names Michael<br />
Jackson and Gary Valenciano.<br />
In an interview<br />
with Ricky Lo this October,<br />
Bitoy said V stood<br />
<strong>for</strong> Del Valle, his mother’s<br />
maiden name.<br />
When Michael V started<br />
in showbiz, he wanted to become<br />
a rapper like Francis<br />
M and Andrew E. He won a<br />
rap contest in “Eat Bulaga,”<br />
and then recorded a rap hit,<br />
“Maganda ang Piliin Mo,”<br />
his answer to Andrew E’s<br />
“Humanap Ka ng Pangit.”<br />
He dis<strong>cover</strong>ed his talent<br />
<strong>for</strong> doing impersonations in<br />
ang tiyan ko. At wala ng keh-viar at<br />
im<strong>for</strong>ted cheeseses (Why, when you<br />
kicked us out. You shameless fiends! I<br />
thought it was Paoay? Why were we sent<br />
to Hawaii? All I ate there were pineapples.<br />
My stomach ached all the time. And there<br />
were no keh-viar and im<strong>for</strong>ted cheeseses.)<br />
Jon as Tita Glorring: I requested <strong>for</strong> a<br />
presidential vehicle. May nag-suggest ba<br />
naman that I send <strong>for</strong> a Little Tikes car!?<br />
Michael V as GMA: Basta negativo ay<br />
nakaka-apekto sa aking buhay (Anything<br />
negative affects my life).<br />
Rene Boy as Ate Glow: When Mike and I<br />
were in Boracay, nag-try kami mag-surf at<br />
ako’y nahulog (we tried surfing and I fell).<br />
HAVE YOU EVER TOLD A LIE?<br />
Willie as Erap: Never!<br />
Tessie as Meldita: Bakit, ano ba ‘yung<br />
lie? I lie down. I lie on the beach. But I<br />
never tell a lie.<br />
Jon as Heneral Eddie: I think Sen. Meeeriam<br />
Defenseeeve should answer that question…<br />
Hindi ba, sabi niya, “I lied, hahahaha!”?<br />
Michael V as GMA: I… am...sorry.<br />
Rene Boy as Ate Glow: Sabi nga ni Kris, “I<br />
may be many things but I am not a liar.”<br />
TELL US THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE<br />
HELLO GARCI TAPES. IS IT TRUE THEY<br />
WERE JUST RECORDED CONVERSATIONS<br />
the now-defunct “Tropang<br />
Trumpo” on ABC-5. He<br />
made the characters Junnie<br />
Lee, Betong, Etoy, and<br />
Bebang household favorites<br />
in the longest-running gag<br />
show (10 years and counting)<br />
“Bubble Gang” on<br />
GMA-7.<br />
Michael V is also known<br />
as the Master of Disguise<br />
and <strong>for</strong> the tagline “Yari ka!”<br />
which he uses in his top-rated<br />
program, “Bitoy’s Funniest<br />
Videos,” also on GMA-7.<br />
BETWEEN WILLIE NEP AND ATE GLOW?<br />
Willie as Willie: Naku ah!<br />
Tessie as Meldita: Kayo naman, bakit<br />
nga ba missing in action? De may<br />
tinatago! For all you know, nagpa-sex<br />
change na si Garci at hindi n’yo na<br />
makikilala. Pagdating niya dito, rarampa<br />
na lang ‘yan sa Library. At iba na ang<br />
tawag sa kanya: Gracia. (Why else<br />
would he be missing in action? Because<br />
he has something to hide! For all you<br />
know, he already had a sex change and<br />
he’s now unrecognizable. When he<br />
returns, he will sashay into the Library.<br />
And he will be called: Gracia.)<br />
Jon as Tita Glorring: Next question please.<br />
Michael V as GMA: Nagkamali sila. Ang<br />
sabi ko, Hello Kitty! (They made a<br />
mistake. What I said was, “Hello, Kitty!”)<br />
Rene Boy as Ate Glow: I was just inquiring<br />
about my pasa load tapos kung anu-ano<br />
na ang lumabas na istorya (and then all<br />
kinds of stories started coming out).<br />
WHOM DO YOU ADMIRE MOST—LIVING<br />
OR DEAD?<br />
Willie as Erap: FPJ living and FPJ dead.<br />
Tessie as Meldita: Sarah Geronimo. Kasi<br />
ang ganda ng boses. I wish I had her<br />
youth. Gusto kong maging bata ulit. I’m so<br />
jealous of her. I miss my youth. I really do.<br />
Kung young ako, nasa “ASAP” ako—<br />
When he’s not brainstorming<br />
<strong>for</strong> his TV shows<br />
and taping episodes (usually<br />
in disguise),<br />
he<br />
takes care<br />
of youngest<br />
son Migo,<br />
drives his<br />
kids Yanni<br />
and Milo to<br />
school, his<br />
wife Carol to<br />
the grocery,<br />
and takes<br />
pictures of strange signs<br />
with his hi-tech cellphone.<br />
One of his most recent<br />
snaps, taken<br />
at the<br />
e n t r a n c e<br />
of a toilet:<br />
“ B a r a d o<br />
—no tae,<br />
ihe puede<br />
(Clogged—<br />
no dumpi<br />
n g , b u t<br />
pissing allowed).”<br />
<<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
37
Pinoy Political Humor<br />
ikumakanta at sumasayaw. (If I were young,<br />
I’d be on “ASAP”—singing and dancing.)<br />
Jon as Tita Korree: My husband. A real<br />
hero. Sa katunayan, nasa pera siya. (In<br />
fact, he is on money.)<br />
Jon as Heneral Eddie: Buti pa si Tita<br />
Koree, ‘yung asawa niya nasa pera. Ako<br />
‘yung pera ko, nasa asawa. (Tita Koree is<br />
better off, her spouse is on money. Me,<br />
my money is with my spouse.)<br />
Michael V as GMA: I admire the dead<br />
because they don’t talk. Hindi na sila<br />
makakasimbulat ng mga sikretong dapat<br />
kalimutan. (They don’t reveal secrets that<br />
are best <strong>for</strong>gotten.)<br />
Rene Boy as Ate Glow: I admire…’yung<br />
dead.<br />
WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST FEAR?<br />
Willie as Erap: To be caught lying.<br />
Tessie as Meldita: Yung magka-wrinkles<br />
na ako. Kasi hanggang ngayon batak na<br />
batak pa ang mukha ko. (Because up to<br />
now, my face has none.) Made in Switzerland.<br />
At kahit ang laki-laki ng wasitline<br />
ko, Balenciaga pa rin ang suot ko. (And<br />
however large my waistline gets, I still<br />
wear Balenciaga.)<br />
Jon as Syerrap: Envelopes.<br />
Jon as Tita Glorring: Tapes.<br />
Michael V as GMA: ‘Yung mga buhay ang<br />
nakakatakot kasi puede ka nilang patayin<br />
(The living are scary because they can kill<br />
you).<br />
Rene Boy as Ate Glow: ‘Yung hindi<br />
tumangkad (Not to grow tall).<br />
IF YOU COULD CHANGE ONE THING<br />
ABOUT YOURSELF WHAT WOULD IT BE?<br />
Willie as Erap: I guess I’ve learned my<br />
lesson while incarcerated. I now read the<br />
Bible and if there’s one thing I’d like to<br />
change about myself, it’s my gambling<br />
habit. I used to play truth or consequence<br />
with my grandchildren. I would always<br />
bet on the consequence. Now I know<br />
better. Now I bet on the truth, because I<br />
know the truth shall set me free.<br />
Tessie as Meldita: Gusto kong palitan<br />
ang apelyido ko. Gusto kong bumalik sa<br />
Romualdez. Kasi mas class ‘yun. (I want to<br />
change my last name. I want to go back to<br />
Romualdez) Romualdez is Spanish. Marcos<br />
is Ilocano. Kinakain namin cocido, paella,<br />
mga Marcoses kinakain saluyot at pakbeht.<br />
(We eat cocido, paella, the Marcoses<br />
eat lowly vegetables.)<br />
Jon as Tita Koree: Ayoko na ng signature<br />
color ko na yellow. For a change, try ko<br />
naman ang light yellow, or better yet,<br />
dark yellow, canary, butter or lemon<br />
yellow. Kung ayaw n’yo lahat ‘yan eh di<br />
off-yellow or yellowish.<br />
Jon as Tita Glorring: I want to change my<br />
husband.<br />
Jon as Eddie: I want to change from ex-<br />
President to Prime Minister. Hehe.<br />
Jon as Syerrap: Gusto ko mag-comeback a<br />
la Arnold Schwarzenegger. Leader siya, not<br />
only of Cali<strong>for</strong>nia but of Planet Hollywood.<br />
Michael V as GMA: The position of my<br />
mole. Mas maganda siguro kung nasa<br />
gitna ng aking noo. Dahil pag nasa gilid,<br />
tumatagilid ang tingin ng mga tao.<br />
Nagiging leftist sila. Minsan kumakanan.<br />
Maganda kung nasa center—nagkakaisa.<br />
(It would be nicer if it were in the middle<br />
of my <strong>for</strong>ehead. When it’s on one side,<br />
people don’t look at you straight. They<br />
become leftist, sometimes they go right. It<br />
would be better at the center—so everyone<br />
would be unified.)<br />
Rene Boy as Ate Glow: My teeth. So I’d<br />
look more sincere when I smile.<br />
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO DIE?<br />
Willie as Erap: I’d like to die a Filipino.<br />
Because the Filipino is worth dying <strong>for</strong>!<br />
Tessie as Meldita: I do not want to die. I<br />
want to live <strong>for</strong>ever! Pero ‘pag ako<br />
namatay, ang rebulto ko nakatayo. Ilagay<br />
n’yo ako sa gitna ng Tacloban. (But if I<br />
die, my statue will be standing up. Put me<br />
in the middle of Tacloban.)<br />
Jon as all four presidents: Next question<br />
please.<br />
Michael V as GMA: Hindi ko iniisip ‘yan.<br />
Ang iniisip ko ay kabuhayan para sa ating<br />
sambayanang Pilipino. (I don’t think of that.<br />
I think about livelihoods <strong>for</strong> our countrymen.)<br />
Rene Boy as Ate Glow: With my partner<br />
after sex.<br />
WHAT IS YOUR LEGACY TO THE FILIPINO<br />
PEOPLE?<br />
Willie as Erap: I’d like to believe that I am<br />
the only President who has touched every<br />
Filipino’s heart in good and bad times. I<br />
was able to bring to each household the<br />
gift of happiness despite desperate economic<br />
conditions and a lot of laughter<br />
amidst embarrassing scandals and controversies.<br />
That is my legacy—the Erap jokes!<br />
Tessie as Meldita: Siyempre ang aking<br />
beauty. Meron pa bang gaganda sa akin<br />
bilang First Lady? (Is there any other First<br />
Lady more beautiful than me?) Excuse me.<br />
At ang aking mga edifices-ces-ces-ces.<br />
Lahat ng mga center d’yan—akin ‘yan.<br />
‘Yung lung center—akin ‘yan, cultural<br />
center—akin ‘yan, heart center—akin<br />
‘yan, puericulture center —akin ‘yan.<br />
Jon as Heneral Eddie: I changed our<br />
country’s image from “Sick Man of Asia” to<br />
“Emerging Tiger.” Nariyan ang successful<br />
APEC conference and Centennial Celebration.<br />
Most importantly, napapunta ko si Thalia<br />
a.k.a. Marimar sa Pilipinas (I was able to have<br />
Thalia, a.k.a. Marimar visit the <strong>Philippine</strong>s).<br />
Jon as Tita Koree: Of course, aside from<br />
the return of democracy, I contributed<br />
some improvements in infrastructures by<br />
way of flyovers, which helped in our election<br />
process kasi nadidikitan sila ng posters<br />
tuwing election (because posters can<br />
be pasted on them during election). Lastly,<br />
my daughter Krissie.<br />
Michael V as GMA: Ang height ko. Sabi ko<br />
sa kanilang lahat, ang small ay talagang<br />
terrible. Akala nila ako’y basta-basta.<br />
Eh hindi pala. Mas malaki pala akong<br />
pumuwing sa kanila. (My height. I’ve told<br />
everyone that small is really terrible. They<br />
thought I could be pushed around, but<br />
they were wrong. I’m better at kicking<br />
sand in their faces.)<br />
Rene Boy as Ate Glow: My mole.<br />
i<br />
><br />
RENE BOY FACUNLA<br />
Rene Boy Facunla says<br />
his uncanny resemblance<br />
to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo<br />
—right down<br />
to her voice—is “all in<br />
the hair, makeup, and<br />
voice muscle control.”<br />
The young man’s got<br />
pluck. How many people<br />
would wear a red terno,<br />
jump into a swimming<br />
pool, and pretend to<br />
drown? He lost a mole<br />
and almost caught a<br />
cold, but Rene Boy said<br />
“cheese” <strong>for</strong> this magazine’s<br />
<strong>cover</strong> shoot.<br />
It is courage and determination<br />
that make his GMA<br />
impersonation remarkable,<br />
plus the fact that he loves<br />
what he’s doing. “I don’t<br />
consider this a job, but as<br />
art,” he says.<br />
Rene Boy is taking up his<br />
Bachelor of Arts in <strong>Philippine</strong><br />
Studies with majors in film and<br />
literature at UP Diliman. He<br />
is writing his thesis on youthoriented<br />
films while juggling<br />
appearances as Ate Glow.<br />
Ate Glow was born in<br />
20<strong>01</strong>, a few days after Edsa<br />
2, which ousted Erap and<br />
installed GMA as President.<br />
Recalls Rene Boy: “I was<br />
supposed to be a gay character<br />
doing <strong>satire</strong> in a show<br />
presented by UP Samaskom<br />
(Samahan ng mga Mag-aaral<br />
sa Komunikasyon). Then<br />
Edsa 2 happened. They<br />
asked me to do GMA. I was<br />
given three days to change<br />
the material. I’d never done<br />
impersonations so I was nervous.<br />
I thought I didn’t look like<br />
GMA and I certainly didn’t<br />
sound like her. But after that<br />
night, I became her.”<br />
And people liked what they<br />
saw and heard. “If you project<br />
the aura of the person you are<br />
impersonating, it transcends<br />
to the crowd,” Rene Boy explains.<br />
Or as Ate<br />
Glow puts it: “Ang<br />
saya-saya, noh?”<br />
In just four years,<br />
he has made three<br />
movies, appeared in<br />
various TV shows,<br />
and even recorded<br />
an audio CD of children’s<br />
songs. When<br />
GMA’s term ends,<br />
“It will be hard,”<br />
says Rene Boy, “but<br />
I can always reposition my<br />
character. Showbiz is not<br />
the end-all and be-all of my<br />
life. I plan to go into film<br />
directing, photography, and<br />
writing.”<br />
Actually,<br />
his impersonations<br />
don’t<br />
start and end<br />
with Ate Glow.<br />
He can also<br />
do starlets<br />
Maui Taylor<br />
and Aubrey<br />
Miles.<br />
Ang sayasaya<br />
talaga!<br />
38 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT
i<br />
> Pinoy Political Humor<br />
Just <strong>for</strong> fun. Tony<br />
Velasquez can juggle<br />
oranges, but his real—<br />
and not-so-hidden—talent<br />
lies in mimicry.<br />
La Vida<br />
Doble<br />
TONY VELASQUEZ<br />
THEY HAVEN’T shown up yet in any<br />
of my medical scans. But I suspect that<br />
buried somewhere in my genome map,<br />
mixed in with the DNA of my mom<br />
and dad, are bits of mynah and parrot<br />
chromosomes.<br />
Not that I’m bird-brained, mind you<br />
(c’mon, say it, and I’ll peck your eyes<br />
out). It’s just that when I’m in the mood<br />
to be cuckoo, my vocal chords ef<strong>for</strong>tlessly<br />
adjust <strong>for</strong> the tone, pitch, and diction<br />
of say, FVR, Congressman Teddyboy<br />
Locsin, or <strong>for</strong> those tipsy moments, even<br />
Erap Estrada. All of them prominent,<br />
powerful men whose voices have to be<br />
heard, and whose voices I just love to<br />
mimic, with monologues that borrow<br />
from their speaking styles and favorite<br />
themes. When I’m in mynah/parrot<br />
mode, I don’t do it to ruffle anybody’s<br />
feathers. It’s just <strong>for</strong> laughs.<br />
And why not? These men are some<br />
of the most humorous politicians I’ve<br />
ever <strong>cover</strong>ed. If they weren’t making<br />
quips or cracking jokes themselves, I’d<br />
be copying their voices to crack jokes<br />
on their behalf. In a way, it’s my own<br />
personal tribute to them, along the lines<br />
of “imitation is the best <strong>for</strong>m of piracy,” er,<br />
flattery. Which means that even if I screw<br />
them with my impersonations, I’ll still<br />
respect them the next morning.<br />
I don’t aspire to be a professional<br />
impersonator. I never did. I’m strictly<br />
amateur, holding impromptu per<strong>for</strong>mances<br />
during dull moments with colleagues at<br />
work, or while relaxing with friends. Once<br />
though, I used my FVR impersonation <strong>for</strong><br />
the National Press Club’s 1997 Gridiron<br />
<strong>satire</strong>. The Gridiron is the NPC’s annual<br />
musical comedy play where the <strong>political</strong><br />
high-and-mighty get skewered, rightly or<br />
wrongly, <strong>for</strong> either entertaining or irritating<br />
the public with their words and deeds.<br />
Then President FVR (Fidel V. Ramos to<br />
non-Pinoys) was in the audience, but it<br />
wasn’t the first occasion where he saw or<br />
heard me doing my spiels as “El Tabako.”<br />
The first time I sprang it on him was at<br />
a Palace cocktail party he hosted <strong>for</strong> the<br />
Malacanañg Press Corps in 1995, during<br />
which he threw in an impromptu raffle<br />
where, in what may be liberally construed<br />
as true Ilocano generosity, he gave away<br />
those wide golfing umbrellas and golf<br />
balls, all with his autograph. The members<br />
of the Corps urged me to emcee the<br />
raffle, and in that moment, like an evolving<br />
mutant superhero, my latent mynah/parrot<br />
ability kicked in. With raised<br />
thumb and a convincing FVR voice, I<br />
thundered one of his favorite lines, “Kaya<br />
ba natin ito (Can we do this)?”<br />
With a resounding cry of “Kaya!!” and<br />
peals of laughter from my audience, I<br />
proceeded to say in my FVR-voice, “Tonight,<br />
I will be raffling off…my autographed<br />
balls. But please, whoever gets them,<br />
please just display them. Don’t hit them!<br />
That would be too painful!” As First Lady<br />
Ming Ramos repeatedly slapped FVR’s<br />
arm while she laughed herself to tears, I<br />
recognized that, indeed, I had a modest<br />
talent that great impersonators like Willie<br />
Nepomuceno, Jon Santos, Rene Facunla<br />
(a.k.a. Ate Glow), and Jaja Bolivar (a.k.a.<br />
Kikiam Defensor) have honed to moneymaking<br />
perfection. In that serendipitous<br />
moment, I found myself considering a<br />
career change.<br />
IT TOOK just a second <strong>for</strong> me to realize<br />
that politics in the <strong>Philippine</strong>s is funny<br />
enough by itself without impersonators<br />
adding the extra twist that makes it even<br />
more hilarious. Yet precisely because it<br />
40 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
gets to be so excruciatingly ridiculous,<br />
<strong>Philippine</strong> politics provides a treasure trove<br />
of issues <strong>for</strong> impersonators to play with.<br />
Recently, on the short-lived and now-defunct<br />
weekly show, “Isyu: Ang Pangulo,<br />
Special Edition,” which I co-hosted with<br />
Cheche Lazaro on ABS-CBN, Ate Glow and<br />
Kikiam Defensor put the Garci and Chacha<br />
controversies through the humor mill,<br />
grinding them up with sharp and wacky<br />
wit. We had Ate Glow in a segment where<br />
she phones in a question to an Ernie Baron<br />
sound-alike (yours truly), on how to prevent<br />
tooth decay, only to have “Ka Ernie”<br />
tell her that she has a bigger problem with<br />
“truth decay,” one that can only go away<br />
with – are you ready <strong>for</strong> this?—“Gloriagate<br />
toothpaste.” Pa-rum-pum!<br />
Some colleagues remarked later that<br />
it might have been inappropriate to treat<br />
these serious <strong>political</strong> issues too lightly.<br />
Certainly, these controversies have caused<br />
a lot of gnashing of teeth and growling<br />
among disgruntled Filipinos, most of all<br />
the anti-Gloria <strong>for</strong>ces. But tension was<br />
running high during the president’s nearimpeachment<br />
crisis, and impersonators<br />
did their share in defusing as much of this<br />
as they comically could. This is where<br />
they became most medically useful: comic<br />
relief <strong>for</strong> the republic’s biggest <strong>political</strong><br />
headaches. In the nation’s search <strong>for</strong> the<br />
truth behind Gloriagate, impersonators<br />
may not be able to break or untangle a<br />
web of lies, but they do what they do to<br />
break the ice, expecting, of course, that as<br />
the targets of their humor fall through the<br />
cracks, the sound of laughter will drown<br />
out the sound of angry protests.<br />
Personally, I don’t think any public<br />
figure that’s been spoofed should get<br />
upset or offended (or charge a copyright<br />
fee). Senator Aquilino Pimentel (when<br />
he was still very fond of President Gloria<br />
Macapagal-Arroyo) once criticized shows<br />
that spoofed President GMA, simply<br />
because he felt she was being ridiculed.<br />
Impersonators usually do caricatures of<br />
prominent people not because they dislike<br />
them, but quite the opposite. The<br />
“Ate Glow” character spoof of 24-year-old<br />
comedian Rene Facunla is one example.<br />
Facunla told Newsbreak magazine in a<br />
2003 interview that he considered the real<br />
Ate Glo (GMA of course) “a president of<br />
substance,” and added that his friends<br />
believed his impersonation was “helping<br />
the president improve her image.”<br />
Then again, that was two years ago,<br />
long be<strong>for</strong>e the Garci controversy exploded,<br />
and long be<strong>for</strong>e Ate Glow’s<br />
“president of substance” was challenged<br />
by an impeachment complaint “lacking in<br />
substance.” (Do we hear the good Senator<br />
Pimentel now asking <strong>for</strong> more ridiculous<br />
Ate CATHY Glo CANTADA spoofs?) This time around,<br />
PHOTOS BY LILEN UY<br />
MAKEUP<br />
HAIR Malacañang’s JERRY JAVIER attempts to evade or brush<br />
STYLIST aside the GUADA Garci REYES issue has spawned copycat<br />
Ate THANKS Glows TO in MANDY protest NAVASERO rallies. SPECIAL Definitely,<br />
none of them<br />
has anything glowing<br />
to say about Ate<br />
Glo. But all of them<br />
are weapons of mass<br />
distraction, drawing the<br />
public’s attention to the<br />
alleged sins of Ate Glo.<br />
AS FAR as great impersonations<br />
go, though, the Garci tapes may showcase<br />
the best of them. That could be why it took<br />
weeks after bootleg CD copies of the tapes<br />
were given away in rallies and in schools,<br />
and after Congress listened to recorded conversations<br />
in open session, <strong>for</strong> Environment<br />
Secretary Mike Defensor to come up with<br />
an audio analysis of the tapes and draw this<br />
enigmatic conclusion: “That’s the president’s<br />
voice, but she’s not the one talking.”<br />
Okay, I can’t mimic this president’s voice.<br />
So was that you, Ate Glow?<br />
The Garci tapes were about wiretapping,<br />
and that’s a crime. But if, as<br />
Defensor seemingly implied, the tapes<br />
were the product of an impersonation,<br />
there’s a greater crime here – a crime<br />
against the humorous art of impersonation<br />
itself. Sure, history is replete with cases<br />
of the famous and the infamous using<br />
doppelgangers as decoys. At one point,<br />
there was even this rumor (long since debunked)<br />
that an impersonator was standing<br />
in <strong>for</strong> the real disco-loving Ferdinand<br />
‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr., who had supposedly<br />
died. None of these, by any stretch<br />
of the imagination, was <strong>for</strong> any humorous<br />
purpose. And I heard no laughter either<br />
while people listened to the Garci tapes.<br />
Impersonations in the <strong>Philippine</strong> setting<br />
are really just an expression of the<br />
The great<br />
pretender.<br />
Velasquez hosts<br />
office parties<br />
when he’s not<br />
reporting on<br />
the news or<br />
pretending to be<br />
Joseph Estrada<br />
(above).<br />
Filipino’s fun-loving,<br />
and occasionally<br />
sarcastic, nature.<br />
The Garci tapes are<br />
nowhere near that<br />
kind of expression.<br />
If anything, they have<br />
evoked only expressions<br />
of disgust and dismay, and<br />
deprecating humor.<br />
A flood of text jokes did pour out<br />
from the Garci episode. But one of the<br />
more unexpected and surreal results was<br />
the sudden re-emergence…of Elvis. Yes,<br />
Elvis was once more in the building! Or<br />
to be more specific, in the studio of the<br />
government-run NBN Channel 4. Hot on<br />
the heels of the Garci controversy, and<br />
at the height of opposition attacks on<br />
the Arroyo government, NBN launched<br />
a show, “Dagundong (Reverberations),”<br />
where the hosts and the guests mingled<br />
on a set designed to look like your<br />
neighborhood sari-sari store. Conspicuously<br />
in the background stood Elvis…actually,<br />
Elvis impersonator Edgar Opida.<br />
In the initial episode of ABS-CBN’s<br />
“Isyu: Ang Pangulo,” I asked Opida to<br />
come over and make sense of why an<br />
Elvis impersonator would be part of<br />
Malacanang’s media counter-offensive.<br />
Opida really couldn’t say, or maybe I<br />
just couldn’t make out his version of a<br />
Memphis mumble. In any case, I still<br />
don’t know if there was any subliminal<br />
message in having an Elvis look-andsound<br />
alike on the NBN show—except<br />
maybe to ask Ate Glo, “Are you lonesome<br />
tonight?” or to warn her that she<br />
was dangerously close to dancing the<br />
“Jailhouse Rock.”<br />
That Elvis episode reminded me of<br />
something the late great U.S. TV host<br />
Johnny Carson once said: “If life were<br />
fair, Elvis would be alive and all the<br />
impersonators would be dead.” To borrow<br />
from Carson, if life in the <strong>Philippine</strong>s<br />
were fair, all the real politicians would<br />
disappear, and their impersonators would<br />
be left behind. After all, the impersonators<br />
cheer us up, make us <strong>for</strong>get our<br />
troubles, and achieve what their real-life<br />
<strong>political</strong> counterparts haven’t done: bring<br />
Filipinos together in feeling good about<br />
something—anything.<br />
It is to everyone’s benefit that when<br />
impersonators go and get a life, they<br />
copy somebody else’s, to the point of<br />
hilarity. They are the embodiment of la<br />
vida doble (no relation to that lothario<br />
of a wiretapper, Sgt. Vidal Doble). And<br />
in sharing with us the wit and humor of<br />
their double (or more) lives, our own<br />
existence becomes much more pleasant<br />
and bearable in the end.<br />
When he isn’t impersonating presidents,<br />
Tony Velasquez is a news correspondent<br />
of ABS-CBN.<br />
i<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
41
i<br />
><br />
Pinoy Political Humor<br />
Mobile<br />
Clowning<br />
SHEILA S. CORONEL<br />
THE EVER-PRESENT mobile phone may<br />
have changed the way Filipinos communicate<br />
with each other, but it has not<br />
restrained their sense of humor. Far from<br />
it. Instead, the mobile phone has served<br />
as an efficient transmitter and disseminator<br />
of jokes, particularly of the <strong>political</strong><br />
variety. Thanks to cellphones, jokesters<br />
have had a field day as their attempts at<br />
humor are not only sent out instantaneously,<br />
but are also passed on from phone<br />
to phone to phone to phone…<br />
There are over 30 million cellphone<br />
users in the country today. The potential<br />
audience <strong>for</strong> a single joke is thus easily<br />
in the millions, surpassing the audiences<br />
of newspapers and all but the best-rating<br />
television and radio programs. Chances<br />
are, every Pinoy who owns a<br />
mobile phone has used<br />
it, not just <strong>for</strong> passing<br />
on personal messages<br />
but also jokes. Phone<br />
company executives<br />
say that jokes are a<br />
staple of SMS messaging,<br />
surpassing<br />
most other types<br />
of messages sent.<br />
This, plus the amazing<br />
speed in which<br />
jokes can travel<br />
in the mobilephone<br />
age, can<br />
only encourage<br />
amateur humorists<br />
of every stripe.<br />
And almost surely,<br />
within hours, even<br />
minutes, of a major<br />
news event, some<br />
joker somewhere<br />
has already<br />
<strong>for</strong>warded to all<br />
in his or her address book a<br />
polished gem of humor.<br />
The “Gloriagate” <strong>political</strong> crisis that began<br />
in mid-2005 has inspired a resurgence<br />
of <strong>political</strong> humor. The crisis was set off<br />
by the release of wiretapped recordings of<br />
the phone calls made and received<br />
by elections commissioner Virgilio<br />
Garcillano in May and June 2004. Some of<br />
those calls discussed election fraud. Several<br />
of them were from President Gloria<br />
Macapagal-Arroyo, who began her calls<br />
with the now famous line, “Hello, Garci?”<br />
Not long after excerpts from the “Hello,<br />
Garci” recording were made public in<br />
early June 2005, cellphones were buzzing<br />
with jokes about the tapes. The symmetry<br />
was perfect: cellphone jokes about<br />
cellphone calls. Where else, but in a cellphone-crazy<br />
country can this take<br />
place? Within days, too, the first<br />
“Hello, Garci” ringtones made<br />
the rounds.<br />
Spliced from some of the<br />
audio material (particularly<br />
President Arroyo’s inimitable<br />
voice) contained in the<br />
wiretapped conversations and<br />
combined with pop music,<br />
the ring tones<br />
were the delight<br />
of cellphone users.<br />
They were<br />
passed on from phone<br />
to phone and were also<br />
posted <strong>for</strong> downloading<br />
in MP3 <strong>for</strong>mat<br />
in a number of<br />
blogs and websites.<br />
This was ideal <strong>for</strong><br />
music-mad Pinoys,<br />
many of whom<br />
owned, apart from<br />
cellphones, also<br />
MP3 players. Within three weeks after<br />
the tapes were made public, there were<br />
already two dozen versions of the “Hello,<br />
Garci” ring tone. Most were made available<br />
<strong>for</strong> downloading from several cyberplaces,<br />
among them the PCIJ blog (www.<br />
pcij.org/blog). Perhaps only in the <strong>Philippine</strong>s<br />
has the ring tone been used as a<br />
weapon of resistance: by passing them on,<br />
anonymous ring-tone composers and disseminators<br />
defied the government warning<br />
that propagating any part the wiretapped<br />
conversations is illegal.<br />
The ring tones are gems of <strong>political</strong><br />
humor, their combination of music and wit<br />
irresistible. There is no purer distillation of<br />
Pinoy humor in the cellphone era than the<br />
“Hello, Garci” ring tones.<br />
FILIPINOS like to think that they can<br />
laugh at anything, and however much they<br />
put themselves down, they believe that<br />
their sense of humor is not only a defining<br />
national trait but also their saving grace.<br />
Among the most strongly held of Pinoy<br />
beliefs is that the ability to laugh—especially<br />
at themselves and the dire circumstances<br />
they find themselves in—has enabled<br />
Filipinos to survive not only natural<br />
42 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
calamity and<br />
social upheaval,<br />
but also the strange<br />
world of <strong>Philippine</strong> politics<br />
and the even stranger<br />
characters who inhabit it.<br />
“Humor has many<br />
uses in the <strong>Philippine</strong>s,”<br />
writes film director Jose<br />
Javier Reyes. “As leveler,<br />
it serves to expose the<br />
foibles of people in high<br />
office, thus bringing them<br />
down to the company of ordinary<br />
men. Humor is also used to circumvent taboos…<br />
Humor, both irreverent and banal,<br />
serves as a soft rebellion against what is<br />
otherwise regarded with awe or considered<br />
correct behavior.”<br />
To Filipinos, humor has always been<br />
a <strong>for</strong>m of protest. Our national heroes<br />
used it in the struggle against Spanish<br />
colonialism. Jose Rizal poked fun at both<br />
colonial authorities and his countrymen<br />
who wanted to be more Spanish than the<br />
Spaniards. Marcelo del Pilar used <strong>political</strong><br />
<strong>satire</strong> to hit at the Spanish friars who<br />
dominated <strong>Philippine</strong> life and the hypocritical<br />
Christianity that they preached.<br />
In their everyday lives, ordinary<br />
Filipinos resort to joking and humor to<br />
undermine the rich and powerful who<br />
have long kept them in thrall. Humor has<br />
always been the preferred weapon of the<br />
weak in this country. The powerful may<br />
prevail in the end, but they can always<br />
be subjected to mockery, mimickry, and<br />
ridicule. Jokes are subversive. They are,<br />
as Reyes says, the great leveler, a way of<br />
fighting back, a path of resistance.<br />
If anything, cellphones have made<br />
this path easier to take. Any Joey or Josie<br />
can think up a joke, key it into a phone,<br />
and pass it on. You don’t have to be a<br />
Jose Rizal or a Marcelo del Pilar. You<br />
don’t have to deal with censors or editors<br />
either. In the anonymous, instantaneous,<br />
and spontaneous world of<br />
mobile telephony, everyone is<br />
welcome and all jokers are<br />
equal. Any joke is passed<br />
on as long as the receiver<br />
finds it funny.<br />
Jokes can be said<br />
to be an important<br />
artifact of our<br />
life as a nation.<br />
They are not just<br />
a commentary on<br />
our politics and<br />
politicians, they<br />
are a <strong>for</strong>m of<br />
<strong>political</strong> participation.<br />
The effect<br />
may not be quite the<br />
PHOTOS BY LILEN UY<br />
MAKEUP same as CATHY displaying CAN-<br />
TADA a placard in a<br />
HAIR demonstration,<br />
JERRY JAVIER<br />
STYLIST but by GUADA joking,<br />
Filipinos<br />
show that<br />
they are<br />
watching,<br />
commenting,<br />
and taking<br />
part in what is<br />
going on. Jokes are as good<br />
an indicator of the public<br />
pulse as opinion polls are.<br />
The fall of Ferdinand Marcos<br />
was preceded by an avalanche<br />
of jokes. The election of Joseph<br />
Estrada was also <strong>for</strong>etold by the jokes,<br />
and indeed, so was his ouster. It is safe to<br />
say that any major upheaval or development<br />
in our <strong>political</strong> life is punctuated by<br />
jokes.<br />
Jokes, there<strong>for</strong>e, are like tea leaves:<br />
those who are astute enough can tell the<br />
<strong>political</strong> future by reading them well. But<br />
we will not go that far. Lacking that kind<br />
of astuteness, we can only say that the<br />
jokes currently circulating and entertaining<br />
us show that Pinoy humor is as irreverent<br />
and indiscriminate as ever. The jokes<br />
poke fun at politicians of every stripe.<br />
While many are jokes about President Arroyo,<br />
there are many as well that ridicule<br />
actor Fernando Poe Jr., who lost to Arroyo<br />
in the 2004 elections. Vice President Noli<br />
de Castro and the other celebrity-politicos<br />
have not been spared. And neither has<br />
the unflappable Senator Miriam Defensor<br />
Santiago. She is up there in the jokers’<br />
pantheon, together with Erap Estrada,<br />
Imelda Marcos, and the crank presidential<br />
candidate Eddie Gil (who, when asked by<br />
a TV journalist what a normal day <strong>for</strong> him<br />
was, answered “Saturday”).<br />
Some of the jokes, in fact, poke fun at<br />
the entire <strong>political</strong> class (Sample: Political<br />
curse: May you have a wife like Imelda, a<br />
daughter like Kris, a mistress like Baby, a<br />
son like Jude, and a husband like Mike.)<br />
Some jokes are mean (remember the baby<br />
stroller delivered to Erap’s Tanay resthouse,<br />
in preparation <strong>for</strong> GMA?). Others<br />
are green or some other off-color;<br />
many are <strong>political</strong>ly incorrect.<br />
But all of them reflect the sentiments—and<br />
the frustrations—of<br />
the <strong>political</strong> moment. Jokes are<br />
the true signs of the times,<br />
even as they make the<br />
unbearable bearable,<br />
eliciting laughter as we<br />
shed tears over the failings<br />
of our leaders and<br />
o f ourselves.<br />
i<br />
This is an excerpt<br />
from the preface<br />
of the PCIJ’s latest<br />
book, Hello, Garci?<br />
Hello, Maam:<br />
Political Humor<br />
in the Cellphone<br />
Age.<br />
JOKE ONLY!<br />
We all know what PROs and Cons are. What<br />
is the opposite of PROgress?<br />
CONgress!<br />
How does GMA sleep?<br />
First she lies to one side, then she lies to the<br />
other side.<br />
Teacher: Today we’re studying percentages. If<br />
there are 10 questions in a quiz and you get<br />
10 correct, what do you get?<br />
GMA: Accused of cheating.<br />
May threat na naman daw sa buhay ni Zuce.<br />
Pinadalhan siya ng mansanas at kawayan.<br />
Galing daw kay Aling Lydia, as in Lydia’s<br />
Lechon.<br />
Good morning, countrymen. This is Noli de<br />
Castro, your future president. I would like to<br />
apologize in advance <strong>for</strong> all the lapses in judgment<br />
that I will commit. I’M SORRY, BAYAN.<br />
GMA: Sana palarin akong magkamit ng katangian<br />
nina Cory at Susan.<br />
Reporter: Ano po yon, ma’am?<br />
GMA: Ang pagiging biyuda nila. Wala sanang<br />
problema ang bayan.<br />
Reporter: What is your plan now, Madame<br />
President?<br />
GMA: I have thought of drowning my troubles<br />
but I can’t get my husband and son to go<br />
swimming.<br />
Mike: Whenever Gloria asks <strong>for</strong> her share of<br />
jueteng money, she calls me handsome.<br />
Nani: Really?<br />
Mike: Yes, she says, “Hoy, HAND SOME of<br />
that money over.”<br />
A man just died and was asked by St. Peter:<br />
Where do you come from?<br />
Man: <strong>Philippine</strong>s, Sir.<br />
St. Peter: You may enter heaven…you’ve suffered<br />
enough from your opposition politicians.<br />
Daddy: ‘Nak, bili mo ko ng softdrink.<br />
Anak: Coke of Pepsi?<br />
Daddy: Coke<br />
Anak: Diet o regular?<br />
Daddy: Regular<br />
Anak: Bote o in can?<br />
Daddy: Bote<br />
Anak: 8 oz o litro?<br />
Daddy: Punyeta! Tubig na lang.<br />
Anak: Mineral o natural?<br />
Daddy: Mineral<br />
Anak: Malamig o hindi?<br />
Daddy: ‘Tang ina, hampasin kita ng walis, e!<br />
Anak: Tambo o tingting<br />
Daddy: Hayop ka!<br />
Anak: Baka o baboy?<br />
Daddy: TARAN-<br />
TADO!<br />
Anak: De Venecia o<br />
ang Kongreso?<br />
More jokes are in<br />
Hello, Garci? Hello,<br />
Ma’am: Political<br />
Humor in the Cellphone<br />
Age. For<br />
inquiries, contact<br />
marketing<br />
@pcij.org or call<br />
9293117.)<br />
<<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
43
i<br />
> Pinoy Political Humor<br />
Where Has<br />
All The<br />
Laughter<br />
Gone?<br />
KATRINA STUART SANTIAGO<br />
FIVE YEARS ago, we had a president who<br />
made as much fun of himself as everyone<br />
else did. Who had his very own jokebook,<br />
and his very own thinktank to make<br />
up stories and jokes that would revolve<br />
around his supposedly being uneducated,<br />
as well as his being uncouth and unpresidential.<br />
This was a time when President<br />
Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada’s impeachment trial<br />
was proceeding in the Senate, and where<br />
the real stars of that show—the senators—<br />
provided us with all kinds of material <strong>for</strong><br />
comedy. There we witness moments of<br />
high anger: (Miriam Defensor Santiago<br />
having two women kicked out of the Senate<br />
gallery <strong>for</strong> allegedly giving her inappropriate<br />
looks) and sorrowful tears (think<br />
Loren Legarda in hot pink), moments of<br />
insanity (Miriam Defensor Santiago, period)<br />
and just plain cluelessness (Ramon<br />
Revilla Sr., duh). As respite, there were<br />
the vocabulary lessons (who can spell<br />
“gobbledygook”?), the law lessons (“si Sir<br />
Roco kasi e!’”), and the lessons in patience<br />
(“Ang tanda na kase ni Ople na tulog<br />
nang tulog”— Ople’s so ancient, he can’t<br />
keep awake). And as a fitting climax to<br />
the show, there was that infamous dance<br />
number (by Tessie Aquino-Oreta)!<br />
At that time, everyone was portrayed as<br />
fair game on the Internet and everywhere<br />
else—from text messages to emails, from<br />
print cartoons to comic strips. There was<br />
no escape. The Internet, after all, is the<br />
most liberal and liberating of media to<br />
work with—uncensorable, untouchable,<br />
although perhaps also incomprehensible<br />
to many. Then, so much was published<br />
from the computers of hi-tech Pinoys who<br />
could only deal with the Erap presidency<br />
by consistently putting down the man, his<br />
cohorts, and all those who voted <strong>for</strong> him.<br />
Proof of this production is the fact that<br />
when PCIJ’s Alecks Pabico decided to look<br />
at online Pinoy parodies of that time, there<br />
was just so much to <strong>cover</strong> (http://www.pcij.<br />
org/imag/Online/pinoyparody.html).<br />
Everyone wanted a piece of the action<br />
then, if only as audience to such a creative<br />
<strong>for</strong>ce. This creativity easily moved from<br />
computer screens to the streets of EDSA 2,<br />
when people created and recreated chants<br />
to fit the hated senator of the moment,<br />
and when banners and streamers were<br />
as funny, and disrespectful, as they could<br />
come. Then, it was our way of dealing with<br />
a historical juncture that we thought was not<br />
our doing (we didn’t vote <strong>for</strong> that man!), but<br />
which we felt we could do something about.<br />
At the very least, we could shake our heads<br />
in disgust and bring the hysteria to the point<br />
of laughter—online and beyond.<br />
Now, a failed EDSA 3 and a junked<br />
impeachment complaint against the new<br />
president later, most of those sites that<br />
Pabico featured—even writer Bob Ong’s<br />
website (http://www.bobongpinoy.com)—<br />
are dead links (pun intended). And one<br />
can’t help but wonder why.<br />
It cannot be that there’s nothing to laugh<br />
about at this point, can it? If it’s true that<br />
all things humorous are based on grains of<br />
reality, then laughter need not end. And yet,<br />
as we continue to receive and <strong>for</strong>ward funny<br />
text messages and emails of jokes, editorial<br />
cartoons, and comic strips from print media,<br />
delving into the state of this GMA-Garci nation<br />
(the last email I saw has GMA’s face plastered<br />
onto a dancing Sexbomb girl’s body),<br />
there is quite a silence on the Internet front.<br />
THIS IS not to say that nothing is being<br />
written. There are tons of complaints,<br />
many bordering on anger. But instead of<br />
sites dedicated to parodying or satirizing<br />
the daily events that should so concern us,<br />
what’s proliferating are weblogs or blogs.<br />
These are online diaries that can be on anything<br />
and everything, with no pretensions<br />
to objectivity or truth, and with illusions of<br />
an audience that will want to read through<br />
text upon text of opinion, rants, and raves.<br />
There are, of course, bloggers who have<br />
used the <strong>for</strong>m of the blog well, basically<br />
because they know what they want it to be<br />
about. Luis Teodoro’s site (www.luisteodoro.<br />
com) is basically just on politics <strong>for</strong> example,<br />
while Paolo Manalo’s site has always been<br />
on Pinoy (pop) culture (be it in the old<br />
www.psychicpants.net and the spanking new<br />
http://www.livejournal.com/~paolomanalo).<br />
These blogs also seem to have a clear sense<br />
of an audience, limited though it may be.<br />
Manalo’s blog, in particular, is funny, not just<br />
because of its chosen concern but because<br />
it is lightly and cleverly written. But it rarely<br />
talks about politics.<br />
In contrast, there are blogs that<br />
are overtly <strong>political</strong>, such as www.angasngkurimaw.blogspot.com<br />
and www.<br />
ourthoughtsarefree.blogspot.com, which<br />
zero in on issues—including media responsibility,<br />
cultural ineptitude, and GMA’s<br />
hardheadedness—hitting the nail on the<br />
head every time. But perhaps because of<br />
the seriousness with which politics do need<br />
to be dealt with, there’s rarely anything to<br />
laugh about in these <strong>political</strong> blogs. The<br />
funny blogs I’ve found, meanwhile, are<br />
mostly non<strong>political</strong> if not altogether a<strong>political</strong>.<br />
There’s the http://akosipaeng.blogspot.<br />
com blog by a Pinoy who seems to always<br />
write about his world as if he’s seeing it <strong>for</strong><br />
the first time; and there are those blogs like<br />
www.tabulas.com/~apester that talks about<br />
44 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
nothing else but food in its recent incarnation,<br />
but has always been fun easy reading.<br />
It is these types of Pinoy blogs, which are<br />
more personal diaries than <strong>political</strong> commentary,<br />
more this-is-my-life than this-is-the-stateof-the-nation,<br />
that have made up much of our<br />
Internet production in recent years. The blog<br />
of course has been celebrated as something<br />
that can function as an alternative source of<br />
in<strong>for</strong>mation (the PCIJ has its own blog, <strong>for</strong><br />
example). For the most part, however, it has<br />
been used by Pinoy techies as a <strong>for</strong>m through<br />
which they may write without limits, even<br />
when there’s nothing much to say. It has<br />
become the rule rather than the exception to<br />
be a<strong>political</strong> and apathetic in the blogs we<br />
create, and that in itself, is no laughing matter.<br />
A personal blog like www.professionalheckler.blog-city.com<br />
is a rare exception<br />
in that it ridicules the <strong>political</strong> state of the<br />
nation by poking fun at its personalities<br />
–akin to Erap’s time. More known <strong>for</strong> his<br />
spoofs of <strong>political</strong> speeches, blogger Loi<br />
Reyes Landicho calls the site a humor blog<br />
born of his agitation over recent <strong>political</strong><br />
events, which to him make <strong>for</strong> “desperate<br />
times require desperate measures.”<br />
But because of the <strong>for</strong>m that it takes,<br />
what Landicho really offers the blog-reader<br />
is still just a hodgepodge of thoughts on<br />
various issues and events that may be<br />
<strong>political</strong> (why is there no outrage over the<br />
junked impeachment complaint?) but are<br />
not always so (why didn’t U.P. win in a<br />
recent pep squad competition?). Still, Landicho<br />
can be funny, especially with his Top<br />
10 Lists a la David Letterman. A recent one<br />
is “The Top 10 (Silliest) Reasons Why GMA<br />
Won’t Resign” (September 23 blog entry):<br />
1. Unlike the Ejercitos, her family does<br />
not own a posh villa in Tanay, Rizal.<br />
In the event that she goes to jail, she<br />
would languish at Camp Capinpin,<br />
deprived of the same luxury being<br />
enjoyed by her predecessor.<br />
2. She would never allow some guy<br />
named Manuel ‘Noli’ de Castro, a graduate<br />
of some school known as UE to take over<br />
the presidency. She did not spend years at<br />
Assumption, Ateneo, UP, and Georgetown<br />
only to give way to a UE graduate! [Taaskilay<br />
to the 9th degree… hmmpf!]<br />
3. Resigning would enrage her god<br />
whom she claims to be on her side and<br />
who makes everything possible <strong>for</strong> her.<br />
Remember her father’s dictum that has<br />
become her favorite cliché? “Do what<br />
issh right. Do your bessht and God will<br />
take care of the ressht.” Whatever.<br />
4. Luck is still on her side. [As I have discussed<br />
here be<strong>for</strong>e, she is fated to become<br />
president.] Filipinos have more important<br />
things to do than join rallies. Despite unfavorable<br />
SWS, Pulse Asia and Ibon Foundation<br />
surveys showing unprecedented<br />
PHOTOS BY LILEN UY<br />
MAKEUP CATHY CANTADA<br />
HAIR public JERRY dissatisfaction JAVIER and distrust, fact is,<br />
STYLIST these GUADA are just REYES figures. People would rather<br />
SPECIAL feed THANKS their families TO MANDY than NAVASERO burn effigies.<br />
5. GMA won’t step down unless Cong.<br />
Mikey Arroyo wins an acting plum.<br />
His latest movie, Sablay na, Pasaway<br />
Pa [which had its premiere in Biliran<br />
Province some time in June] has yet<br />
to be shown in Metro Manila theaters.<br />
Reports say bookers decline to release<br />
the cheap flick <strong>for</strong> obvious reasons.<br />
6. She will only relinquish her post as<br />
soon as the <strong>Philippine</strong>s has overtaken<br />
Indonesia in the Asian corruption index<br />
ranking. We’re still at number 2. Becoming<br />
number 1 would be a feat indeed!<br />
7. The concept of delicadeza is alien to her.<br />
8. GMA simply cannot imagine herself behind<br />
bars while the First Gentleman goes<br />
shopping in Hong Kong with Vicky Toh.<br />
9. GMA dreams of a royal wedding <strong>for</strong><br />
her only daughter Luli in Malacañang.<br />
Not in Lubao Church, not at the Manila<br />
Cathedral. The plan is to invite heads of<br />
state as well as <strong>for</strong>mer US President and<br />
GMA classmate Bill Clinton. The event<br />
will eclipse the profligacy of the Imee<br />
Marcos-Tommy Manotoc wedding.<br />
10. And finally, GMA won’t resign because<br />
she’s not the president. She’s just<br />
an overstaying palace visitor.<br />
STRANGELY ENOUGH, while this list is<br />
funny in its “silliness,” all it musters is a<br />
smile—hardly a laugh. Probably because<br />
it hits too close to home, and there’s<br />
nothing funny in the way Landicho has<br />
reworked it. In fact, most of these could,<br />
if not altogether, be true (save <strong>for</strong> number<br />
9, which is actually referring to the Irene<br />
Marcos-Greggy Araneta wedding). It is<br />
obvious that GMA has no delicadeza, and<br />
it is possible that she has believed her<br />
own propaganda about God being on her<br />
side. Even more painfully true is the possibility<br />
that she’s just lucky—people aren’t<br />
in the mood <strong>for</strong> rallies, or <strong>for</strong> in<strong>for</strong>mation<br />
that will lead them there. Number 10, in<br />
particular, isn’t funny because it reminds<br />
us that we may have handled Erap and<br />
EDSA 2 all wrong. In fact, the funniest<br />
thing about this list is the way it makes<br />
fun of GMA’s speech defect (see number<br />
3), which is similar to the way we made<br />
fun of Erap’s grammar.<br />
So, why doesn’t this work? If Landicho’s<br />
blog entry <strong>for</strong> September 6 entitled<br />
“The Award Goes To” is any indication,<br />
then this may have more to do with<br />
ideology than with creativity. This entry<br />
pokes fun at the personalities involved<br />
in the impeachment case against GMA.<br />
There the “Cry Me a River” award <strong>for</strong><br />
example, given to Dinky Soliman <strong>for</strong><br />
crying publicly three times since resigning<br />
as social-welfare secretary, while still<br />
looking “fashionable with the highlights<br />
in her hair Jolinaesque indeed!”<br />
There’s the “Mag-diet Ka Muna” award<br />
given to Taguig-Pateros Rep. Alan Peter<br />
Cayetano (<strong>for</strong> obvious reasons), and the<br />
“Not Enough Vitamins, Not Enough Life”<br />
award given to Sorsogon Rep. Francis<br />
Escudero <strong>for</strong> being absent during the<br />
pro-impeachment walkout in Congress<br />
because, according to him, he was ill.<br />
Here, it becomes clear why Landicho’s<br />
humor blog isn’t always funny. On the<br />
one hand, it has the temerity to make<br />
fun of the current state of the nation<br />
(when it wants to). On the other, it isn’t<br />
very clear where the blog stands in all<br />
these issues. When we find the need to<br />
poke fun at both GMA and her opposition,<br />
i.e., Soliman, Cayetano, Escudero et<br />
al., we also end up being unclear about<br />
who we’re <strong>for</strong>. As far as Landicho’s blog<br />
is concerned, strong statements are also<br />
made against what he calls the “obsolete<br />
Left,” obviously without taking into consideration<br />
all the steps this Left has taken<br />
toward compromise over and above the<br />
rallies that it has led. In Erap’s time, our<br />
enemies were clear, and our allies even<br />
clearer. We did not criticize both sides,<br />
and we reveled in having more and more<br />
people on our side—the Left, the Right,<br />
the religious in all its denominations.<br />
Now, as far as the professional heckler is<br />
concerned, there are no enemies, or any<br />
allies. And it’s unclear what all that (supposed)<br />
laughter is addressing.<br />
Over at another humor blog, the sides<br />
are even less clearly drawn. Created by<br />
graphic artist, now blogger Retzwerx,<br />
www.retzwerx.com has become known<br />
<strong>for</strong> what are called “poop-to-graphs.”<br />
Here, <strong>Philippine</strong> politics is made fun of<br />
by adding thought and speech balloons<br />
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM<br />
I REPORT<br />
45
Pinoy Political Humor<br />
to photographs of the President, <strong>for</strong><br />
example, and her gang:<br />
That this is barely funny is again proof<br />
of the mediocrity of <strong>political</strong> humor on the<br />
Internet today. What exactly is it making<br />
fun of? Is it making fun of GMA? For having<br />
done what exactly? What is it grounded<br />
on? That Retzwerx himself has recently<br />
shifted from politics to reality TV’s “Pinoy<br />
Big Brother” as main topic is indicative not<br />
of the freedom allowed the blogger who<br />
owns his blog, but of the lack of a clear<br />
<strong>political</strong> agenda that should drive any site<br />
set on inspiring change through laughter.<br />
For the most part, it looks like the Pinoy<br />
blogs that have the guts to make fun of our<br />
politics are really only reactionary. They<br />
don’t have a clear stand on things, much<br />
less a sense of what to aspire <strong>for</strong>.<br />
BEYOND THE blogs though, there seems<br />
to be hope, albeit a very small one. The<br />
site www.pldt.com has continued to survive,<br />
and is in fact one of the few sites that<br />
fills that gap between the anti-Erap parody<br />
sites and the anti-GMA angry/reactionary<br />
blogs. While serious in its thrust of being<br />
anti-Arroyo at this point, particularly after<br />
the impeachment complaint was junked<br />
in Congress (see http://www.pldt.com/<br />
tipping%20point.htm), the site itself continues<br />
to be a <strong>for</strong>ce to reckon with. Not only<br />
does it continue to belong to the Top 50<br />
Google sites in the news/<strong>satire</strong> directory, it<br />
also continues to rightly claim that it cares<br />
<strong>for</strong> the state of the nation, beyond Erap Estrada<br />
and EDSA 2. Just the same, however,<br />
there is obviously a lot less irreverence<br />
now than there was in Erap’s time—and a<br />
lot more anger directed at GMA.<br />
Probably the only site that more than<br />
makes up <strong>for</strong> the dismal lack in <strong>political</strong><br />
humor in light of current events is<br />
journalist Alan C. Robles’s online tabloid<br />
Hot Manila (www.hotmanila.com). Created<br />
by someone who has been writing<br />
<strong>political</strong> humor in newspapers <strong>for</strong><br />
nearly 20 years, Hot Manila is clear in its<br />
stand and has a good grasp of issues. It<br />
is also well-researched, and obviously<br />
well-thought out. It uses graphics and<br />
photographs as well, alongside anti-GMA<br />
articles that make fun of her and the way<br />
she runs the country. It creates lists, too,<br />
but only to point out the parallelism, say,<br />
between having GMA as your lavandera<br />
and having her as president. (Among the<br />
top 10 reasons you wouldn’t want her as<br />
lavandera, it says, is that she might “launder<br />
something other than your clothes.”)<br />
Hot Manila skewers other <strong>political</strong><br />
personalities, such as the missing elections<br />
commissioner Garcillano in an article<br />
entitled “Cooking with Garci” (http://www.<br />
hotmanila.com/humor/cookbook.htm),<br />
which is a cook (read: pagluluto ng eleksyon)<br />
book that’s particularly his (Recipe<br />
1: Malacañang Delight, take one ballot<br />
box, and that’s it!). “The Arroyo administration:<br />
Good and bad,” meanwhile, is not<br />
only funny but is also a reminder of how<br />
this government has wasted money, ignored<br />
public clamor <strong>for</strong> better governance, and<br />
helped big business in its continuing plunder<br />
of the economy all these years (http://www.<br />
hotmanila.com/humor/good&bad.htm).<br />
But a Hot Manila that captures an audience’s<br />
attention because of its humor, and<br />
also in<strong>for</strong>ms enough to <strong>for</strong>ce us to take a<br />
stand is but one in a sea of sites and blogs.<br />
Generally, what we have are sites that are<br />
nothing but exercises in proving one’s ability<br />
to write and attract a readership, even<br />
when one isn’t saying much. This is what<br />
abounds today, to the country’s detriment,<br />
and the GMA government’s delight.<br />
This brings to mind a friend’s observation<br />
that it was so much easier to gather people,<br />
i.e., the middle class, against Erap because<br />
of the “matapobre factor.” We felt that he<br />
was not good enough <strong>for</strong> us, and we were<br />
fighting him on all levels—particularly on<br />
the Internet where nothing is censored, and<br />
where the jokes and parodies can go from<br />
foolish and childish to great and creative.<br />
These days the lack of online laughter is not<br />
The Arroyo Administration: Good and Bad<br />
GOOD<br />
Spent more than P600 million on road building<br />
Killed Marcos henchman and arch opportunist<br />
Blas Ople by <strong>for</strong>cing him to do real work<br />
Magnanimously went out of its way to help out<br />
a family that was in serious trouble<br />
Successfully redistributed incomes<br />
Showed that any ordinary nincompoop could<br />
run the Department of Trade<br />
Won the war against terrorists<br />
Made the country recall President Diosdado<br />
Macapagal’s greatness<br />
Showed extraordinary compassion<br />
Fought corruption<br />
Was the first administration in 30 years to<br />
successfully invite a US president over <strong>for</strong> a<br />
state visit<br />
46 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT<br />
only a measure of our stand on things, if any,<br />
but is also revealing of how exactly the Net<br />
functions in this country: it is really but a middle-class<br />
tool, and one that we used successfully<br />
against Erap because he wasn’t like us.<br />
Faced with a president who is the opposite<br />
of Erap—a GMA who is highly educated<br />
and doesn’t seem to be crass, and who talks<br />
about the economy with such authority we<br />
come to believe what she says as true —our<br />
Internet production has become useless. We<br />
can’t quite see GMA as the enemy, since the<br />
enemy in this case is Noli de Castro, who is<br />
perceived to be of Erap’s social and educational<br />
class. It is the “matapobre factor” all<br />
over again, except that this time, it is working<br />
<strong>for</strong> the incumbent because the pobre who<br />
can’t quite measure up is the vice president.<br />
With the really funny parodies and<br />
<strong>satire</strong>s, laughter becomes the only defense<br />
against the truthfulness. But what happens<br />
when those truths aren’t clear to us? What is<br />
there to laugh about when the reality means<br />
looking at ourselves and being uncertain<br />
and lost, counting on others to tell us what<br />
to think? We cannot make fun of the state<br />
of the nation without being serious about<br />
where we stand. We can’t just simply hate<br />
everyone—the government, the opposition,<br />
the church, the communists—without having<br />
a sense of the different colors they carry,<br />
and what those colors mean. We also can’t<br />
simply be angry—that doesn’t achieve much,<br />
as proven by EDSAs 2 and 3. Maybe that’s<br />
why blogs like professionalheckler’s just<br />
aren’t funny. There are no truths to pick on<br />
and laugh about so hard that it hurts.<br />
Meanwhile, as we problematize the fact<br />
that we can barely laugh in this country, elsewhere<br />
in the Pinoy internet (blogging) world,<br />
young poets are fighting among themselves<br />
over their craft, their influences, their art. Now<br />
THAT, in the context of a nation in the throes<br />
of despair, is worth laughing at.<br />
The author is working on her master’s<br />
degree at the U.P. She is a freelance writer<br />
and editor, but her passion is teaching.<br />
BAD<br />
It was just one road<br />
Declared his corpse a national hero<br />
It was the Lopez family<br />
Nobody knows where the incomes were<br />
redistributed to<br />
He wasn’t an ordinary nincompoop<br />
The terrorists don’t know it<br />
Seems there was nothing to recall<br />
To Joseph Estrada<br />
Corruption won<br />
The president turned out to be<br />
George W. Bush<br />
i
i<br />
><br />
Pinoy Political Humor<br />
Kick<br />
Out the<br />
Clowns<br />
ALAN C. ROBLES<br />
OUR FOLKLORE is populated by frightful,<br />
bizarre monsters. For instance, there’s<br />
the aswang, a shape-changing horror that<br />
eats human fetuses and runs <strong>for</strong> public<br />
office. Or the amaranhig, an undead<br />
creature that tickles victims to death and<br />
runs <strong>for</strong> public office. Or the tikbalang, a<br />
horse-headed humanoid that attacks unwary<br />
travelers and runs <strong>for</strong> public office.<br />
Of course I’m lying. These creatures<br />
could actually never run <strong>for</strong> office—<br />
they’d be disqualified <strong>for</strong> being imaginary<br />
(they could probably cast votes,<br />
fictitious characters do that all that time<br />
in our country). But even if they were<br />
real and tried to run, they’d find all the<br />
positions already held by truly loathsome,<br />
bloodsucking abominations.<br />
You’re betting I’m going to say “politician,”<br />
aren’t you? How did you guess? But<br />
don’t think this is a cheap joke. Nothing<br />
about our politicians is cheap—we pay<br />
billions every year to support them. And<br />
what do we get in return? Dedicated,<br />
selfless and incorruptible service. Integrity<br />
and fearless espousal of the rights of the<br />
poor. If you aren’t laughing bitterly by<br />
now, you’re clearly not a Filipino taxpayer.<br />
Not many of us give too much<br />
thought to our politicians, and rightly so.<br />
There are more important things to think<br />
about, such as human intestinal flora, or<br />
the mating habits of tropical nematodes.<br />
But if we’d only spare some time and<br />
give some thought to our politicians, if<br />
we looked closely at the role they play<br />
in our lives and our country’s day-to-day<br />
dealings, then I’m pretty sure we’d immediately<br />
go back to the nematodes.<br />
Yet even a close study of nematodes,<br />
which reference books say include simple,<br />
parasitic worms ranging up to eight<br />
meters in length, has a disturbing way of<br />
bringing Filipino traditional politicians to<br />
mind. And it’s possible that studying our<br />
politicians will help us understand why<br />
our country is in its current shape (in a<br />
word, “screwed”). So if were to keep our<br />
inquiry dispassionate and treat politicians<br />
as we would any other slimy, spineless<br />
lower life <strong>for</strong>m, we’d certainly come to a<br />
keener and deeper understanding of why<br />
we keep wanting to move abroad and<br />
change our citizenship.<br />
ANY DISCUSSION on politicians would<br />
have to begin with their origin. Most<br />
Filipinos would certainly love to know<br />
where their politicians come from (one<br />
reason is that maybe they can return them,<br />
or claim some <strong>for</strong>m of product liability<br />
from the manufacturer). If we want to be<br />
mythological about it, we can speculate that<br />
our politicians were perhaps created at the<br />
dawn of time when lightning split a tree<br />
open, and from the trunk emerged the very<br />
first beings: Malakas, Maganda, and Magulang.<br />
One of them would have looked like<br />
a Speaker of the House.<br />
If we want be more scientific, then we<br />
can theorize that politicians, like all the rest<br />
of us, came from single-celled, primitive<br />
life <strong>for</strong>ms, only in their case they skipped<br />
any further development. On an evolution<br />
chart, politicians would be somewhere<br />
between talk-show hosts and TV-commercial<br />
copywriters. Imelda Marcos would<br />
have her own branch, a dead end. Another<br />
possible explanation is that politicians are<br />
mutants who spring into existence when an<br />
otherwise normal person is brought near to<br />
a deadly, toxic substance like money.<br />
All politicians have similar characteristics:<br />
they have thick faces and hides and are<br />
immune to heat, cold, and extreme poverty.<br />
They are very nimble, able to spin around<br />
into any position while turning their coats.<br />
Just as cats are supposed to be able to always<br />
land upright, traditional politicians are capable<br />
of surviving any fall, landing on their feet<br />
with their hands still in your pocket.<br />
Generally speaking, Filipino politicians<br />
come in two varieties: alive and dead. If you<br />
think the dead ones can’t ruin your day at all,<br />
you clearly haven’t been paying attention to<br />
the names of the corpses being buried with<br />
honors at the National Heroes Cemetery.<br />
There are several types of live politicians,<br />
but the most common is the “traditional”<br />
variety, so called <strong>for</strong> their firm adherence to<br />
“traditional” core values, which are love of<br />
self and self-interest, in that order. Traditional<br />
politicians—trapos <strong>for</strong> short—have<br />
keen analytical minds that enable them to<br />
see all sides in an issue, so that they can<br />
pick the one that will help them fulfill their<br />
main purpose: to build huge mansions and<br />
send their kids to school abroad using other<br />
people’s money. In fact, one of the dead<br />
giveaways that a person is a trapo is that his<br />
or her home keeps steadily getting bigger<br />
each year. Through hard work and patience,<br />
a politician who starts with a humble modest<br />
house could in a few years hope to end up<br />
owning the Lower House.<br />
POLITICIANS USUALLY belong to groups<br />
called “parties.” There used to be only two<br />
of them, the Nacionalistas and the Liberalistas,<br />
but free-market economics and globalization<br />
have opened up the field so that now<br />
there are dozens of parties. But all of them<br />
can trace their roots to that great “mother<br />
party” of the <strong>Philippine</strong>s, the Opportunistas.<br />
To help them in their work politicians<br />
rely on a variety of faithful assistants and<br />
supporters, which they create by synthesizing<br />
life in great unholy laboratories. Just<br />
kidding. Actually they buy them: in the<br />
marketplace, where flunkies are available<br />
at great volume discounts. When Americans<br />
hear the word “stooges” they probably think<br />
of that famous comedy team of Larry, Moe,<br />
and Curly Joe. Here in our country, stooges<br />
go by many names, <strong>for</strong> instance, Belinda,<br />
Alex, and Amando. They will remain loyal<br />
until death, or until the next administration<br />
changes, whichever comes first.<br />
And of course, no trapo is complete<br />
without at least guards, affectionately<br />
called “goons,” to protect his or her<br />
person. Even if the trapo doesn’t need<br />
protection, a squad of goons brandishing<br />
handheld radios and guns always give the<br />
right touch of class. Some trapos bring<br />
them everywhere, even to the bathroom.<br />
Having briefly discussed politicians, we<br />
now come to the most important question:<br />
where is the best country to move to? No, actually,<br />
the question is what are our politicians<br />
good <strong>for</strong>? The popular view is that politics is a<br />
circus and that our politicians are clowns who<br />
entertain the public and make them laugh.<br />
Just look at these great moments of<br />
comedy. In 1949, the Senate president, Jose<br />
Avelino was investigated <strong>for</strong> corruption. He<br />
got very angry and exclaimed, “What are we<br />
in power <strong>for</strong>?” He got off the hook. In 20<strong>01</strong>,<br />
Tessie Aquino Oreta, a senator who voted<br />
to protect Joseph Estrada and was caught on<br />
video capering gleefully about it, later told an<br />
interviewer, “What is most important to me is<br />
my family.” And this year, it was dis<strong>cover</strong>ed<br />
that the president’s eldest son, Congressman<br />
Mikey Arroyo, was worth P74 million, when<br />
last decade he only had P50,000.<br />
Okay, so you might not find that funny.<br />
But at least the clowns are laughing.<br />
Alan C. Robles is editor of Hot Manila, a<br />
columnist at the South China Morning<br />
Post, and a lecturer at the International<br />
Institute <strong>for</strong> Journalism in Berlin.<br />
i<br />
48 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
M A I L B O X<br />
SCAPEGOATING THE SYSTEM<br />
In “The Unmaking of the President” (i<br />
Report Special Issue), Ms. Sheila Coronel<br />
faults mainly the social and <strong>political</strong><br />
system or structure <strong>for</strong> the recurring crises<br />
that afflict the <strong>Philippine</strong>s rather than<br />
on the individual. What is suggested by<br />
this position is that if we just re<strong>for</strong>m the<br />
system or the structure, we would spare<br />
ourselves from these recurring crises.<br />
But it is individuals that make up<br />
and operate the <strong>political</strong> system and<br />
the agencies of government not just of<br />
the <strong>Philippine</strong>s but of all systems and<br />
governments. According to Buddhist<br />
precepts, the world is on fire with desire<br />
and aversion. We are constantly running<br />
after things that are pleasurable and are<br />
fleeing from things that displease us. No<br />
one is immune from these twin afflictions<br />
<strong>for</strong> as long as one is immersed in the<br />
phenomenal world of impermanence.<br />
Ms. Coronel in the very first sentence<br />
of her article captures a key Buddhist<br />
principle regarding individual karma—<br />
whatever you sow, so shall you reap. It<br />
is also one of the key teachings of Jesus<br />
Christ. It is not just Filipinos who suffer<br />
as a result of their ignorance of their true<br />
nature and the pursuit of their desires and<br />
ambitions. It is a universal and existential<br />
condition and not just the effect of any<br />
particular <strong>political</strong> system or structure.<br />
Anywhere we look in this world, there is<br />
suffering and ignorance. Rich and poor,<br />
developed and developing countries are<br />
all in the same condition. Absolutely no<br />
one is spared.<br />
In the <strong>Philippine</strong>s, we are witnessing<br />
today the high drama of individuals<br />
caught up in their insatiable hunger <strong>for</strong><br />
power, money, position, popularity and<br />
possessions. What makes it scandalous<br />
is that our highest officials are involved.<br />
But let us not delude ourselves because the<br />
same ignorance, hunger, aversion, suffering<br />
and dissatisfaction exist in all of us.<br />
Yes, we remain trapped in this condition<br />
but not because of our <strong>political</strong> system<br />
or our social structure. It is because the<br />
seeds of ignorance, desire and aversion are<br />
deeply implanted in our very being.<br />
ED ARO<br />
The <strong>Philippine</strong> Embassy<br />
The Hague, Netherlands<br />
WRONG FORMAT<br />
Your first issue, about food is amazingly<br />
worthy reading. I found the book <strong>for</strong>matreally<br />
interesting. It will also last, considering<br />
the kind of paper used. That was the<br />
main reason why I decided to subscribe to<br />
the i Report.<br />
All the while, I was expecting to<br />
receive the same type of material. To my<br />
dismay, your September issue (despite<br />
its important contents) was presented in<br />
a magazine <strong>for</strong>mat and had a less lasting<br />
<strong>cover</strong>. I am sorry, but I do not agree with<br />
your reasons that magazine vendors like it<br />
that way to attract more customers.<br />
I want you to revert to your original<br />
book <strong>for</strong>mat, which will be on my shelves<br />
<strong>for</strong> a longer time.<br />
LAURENCE L. DELINA<br />
Civil engineer<br />
laurence_delina@yahoo.com<br />
The editor’s reply:<br />
Thank you <strong>for</strong> your feedback. We regret<br />
that you do not find the magazine <strong>for</strong>mat<br />
of i Report as interesting as the book <strong>for</strong>mat.<br />
The change in <strong>for</strong>mat was a difficult<br />
one <strong>for</strong> us to make. But in the end, our<br />
sales and circulation—which have nearly<br />
tripled since the <strong>for</strong>mat change—reaffirm<br />
our decision. I hope you understand. I<br />
prefer the book <strong>for</strong>mat myself, but I have to<br />
concede that the market at this time seems<br />
to be more hospitable to the current, magazine<br />
<strong>for</strong>mat.<br />
COMPARATIVE GOVERNMENT<br />
I am one of the many who admire the<br />
timely relevance of your articles, and the<br />
depth of your analyses. It is just so sad<br />
that after everything has been said and<br />
done, we make issues come to pass like<br />
these were simply part of everyday life,<br />
and accept the system that breeds what<br />
is basically wrong in our society. I grew<br />
up in the days when individual and family<br />
honor were revered and the likes of<br />
Salonga, Tañada, Diokno, Rodrigo, etc.<br />
graced the halls of intelligent and nationalistic<br />
discourse. Gone may be those days,<br />
but our basic sense of right and wrong remains.<br />
We know what you write is right.<br />
As we are about to debate on our<br />
future <strong>for</strong>m of government, I would like<br />
to request that you come up with an issue<br />
that contains a comparative analysis of<br />
the presidential, parliamentary and federal<br />
<strong>for</strong>ms of government. We’d like to know<br />
the difference in their structures, manner of<br />
governance, funding allocations, advantages<br />
and disadvantages, pitfalls of each in the<br />
<strong>Philippine</strong> setting, etc. For instance, the<br />
Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA) is an automatic<br />
appropriation <strong>for</strong> LGUs in the current<br />
system, so what happens if there would be<br />
a shift to, say, parliamentary or federalism?<br />
It would be very in<strong>for</strong>mative if we can have<br />
a matrix of what the differences are.<br />
Of course, I understand that, regardless<br />
of <strong>for</strong>m of government, the success<br />
of whatever system we adopt can only<br />
depend on the quality and the character<br />
of our leaders. Kindly enlighten us on<br />
this issue. I’m an incurable optimist,<br />
but it would also be nice to know how<br />
we are going to get screwed parliamentarilly<br />
or federally, knowing that we are<br />
already getting it presidentially.<br />
JOSE MA. D. VILLANUEVA<br />
Executive Director<br />
The NOVA Foundation <strong>for</strong> Differently<br />
Abled Persons, Inc.<br />
Unit 28, 2nd/F, Columbia Tower<br />
Ortigas Avenue, Mandaluyong City<br />
50 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
PCIJ<br />
i REPORT<br />
THE MOCKERY<br />
OF MIMICRY<br />
This is a country where there’s always someone as a bug, and to approximate the president’s size,<br />
spoofing a president—dead or alive—on TV, during<br />
concerts, Halloween parties, and from time to hilarious but the presidential task <strong>for</strong>ce on politi-<br />
stayed close to the ground with legs bent. He was<br />
time, at people power marches on Edsa.<br />
cally correct humor didn’t think so and it’s been a<br />
There are a few who stand out, who have year since Bitoy morphed into Gloria.<br />
endured a revolution or two, and became icons. Rene Boy Facunla (who occupies the left side<br />
Willie Nepomuceno, Tessie Tomas, and Jon Santos of the presidential bed) is the real person inside<br />
have been around longer than some of the presidents<br />
and presidential wannabes (Cory, FVR, Erap, feather boa.) He is the latest addition to this band<br />
Ate Glow (the one wearing a satin nightdress and<br />
FPJ, GMA, Roco, Ping, Bro. Eddie, and Eddie Gil) of Excellencies. The remarkable thing about Ate<br />
they’ve emulated.<br />
Glow is he looks and sounds like GMA, even when<br />
Michael V’s GMA in the top-rated TV show he’s not per<strong>for</strong>ming.<br />
“Bubble Gang” was more cartoon than impersonation.<br />
He wore a bad wig, buck teeth, a mole as big But then, so is almost everyone<br />
“But I’m taller,” he says.<br />
else.<br />
PHOTO BY LILEN UY; MAKEUP CATHY CANTADA; HAIR JERRY JAVIER;<br />
STYLIST GUADA REYES; SPECIAL THANKS TO MANDY NAVASERO